Every day around 6 a.m., Ken Saywood wakes up to the sound of planes taking off a few meters from his house.

He doesn’t reside under a flight path in central Sydney or Brisbane – he lives in a regional air park in Queensland.

“We wanted somewhere where our plane could be close to a runway and this was the ideal location,” Mr Saywood said.

His two-storey house is one of dozens of others just meters from Whitsunday Airport’s 1.4 kilometer runway.

“Sometimes it gets quite noisy here in the morning when lots of scenic flights leave,” Mr Saywood said.

The noise is offset by the convenience of its own hangar adjacent to the house with easy access to its pride and joy: a 1980s seaplane designed to ferry tourists across the 74 Whitsunday Islands.

“(These seaplanes) were the vital link to the islands, and for tourists they carried cargo, and now helicopters (have) taken over,” Mr Saywood said.

“It’s still a perfectly usable aircraft – they can be maintained virtually forever, these light aircraft.”

He said his home – a minute’s drive from the runway – was “the perfect place for people who own a plane, who love aviation and want to fly easily.”

A community built on flight

Lee Holloway, director of Whitsunday Airport, first heard of the airpark concept during a visit to the Avalon International Airshow, west of Melbourne.

“I saw this amazing little stand with houses on a track and I know it’s quite popular in (the United States), but nothing like this had been done (around the Whitsundays),” Ms. Holloway.

“We’re very lucky to have the reef and Whitehaven (beach). Literally, as soon as you leave here you see islands and it’s just beautiful.”

The concept of an airpark – a housing estate allowing recreational pilots and aviation enthusiasts to house their planes on their doorstep – originated in the United States, but there are numerous developments in Australia, Queensland, New -South Wales and Western Australia.

In tropical north Queensland, the airstrip, 7.5 kilometers from Airlie Beach, dates back to the 1960s, when seaplanes carried not only tourists but also vital supplies to resorts on the outer islands.

The 57-block site has slowly filled with homes over the past two decades, but it is still far from capacity.

The land on either side of the airstrip is divided into blocks ranging from 1,000 to 1,400 square meters.

Some further west are reserved for hangar-like sheds with integrated living quarters, while others to the east are reserved for more spacious houses.

A larger block will cost you almost $500,000, and that’s not counting the cost of building an airstrip with more than 100 aircraft movements per day.

For comparison, a small plane can be kept in a hangar at the airstrip for $22 a night, or a little more than $8,000 a year.

Ms Holloway said it was a win-win situation.

“It’s about planes or helicopters and they all sit and talk and then they start traveling – they take trips, they talk about their trips.”

Where sheds become a home

About 87km north of Mackay, developer and aviation enthusiast Garry Poole has been developing plans for a hybrid housing and hangar precinct at Lakeside Airstrip for a decade.

“We had warbirds in there, Tiger Moths, lots of ultralight planes and general aviation planes,” he said.

“(At Christmas) we get all the locals out, take the school kids for a ride, bring them down and show them what’s going on.”

Mr Poole bought the rural land near Bloomsbury airstrip in 1981 to store his aircraft.

He said aviation was a lifelong passion.

Over the past decade, however, plans to expand the strip into a hybrid neighborhood of housing and hangars have been developed.

Mr Poole’s vision for the homes included lake views and a 1.1km airstrip.

“I tell people, ‘If you can’t land within 0.7 miles, give it away,'” he said.

The development of almost 30 lots has attracted considerable interest: of 10 blocks at the current stage, eight have been sold, ahead of an official opening later this month.

“I always wanted to fly”

In Shute Harbor, Ken Saywood said he and his wife, Denise, found a place where they could indulge their love of flying as often as they could, while they could.

“I started very young. I grew up on a dairy farm in Tasmania, but I always wanted to fly planes, ever since I was little,” he said.

“I have a short time left before I get my pilot’s license, I’m getting a lot older than I was.

“Nevertheless, we will probably stay here for a while, until we are no longer able to live here comfortably,” he said.