Building Your Own 'Field of Dreams'
A runway in your backyard offers perhaps the ultimate in privacy and convenience. Here’s what you have to consider, do, and spend to make it a reality.
February 2021
Arthur Jones, the founder of fitness companies Nautilus and MedX, was an animal lover who kept elephants, rhinos, and a gorilla on his estate, Jumbolair, near Ocala, Florida. An accomplished pilot, he’d fly the animals in on a Boeing 707 and later on his 747 jumbo jet because the 707 “wasn’t big enough for the elephants.”
Jones bought the original 80-acre estate in 1980, added hundreds of surrounding acres, and built its centerpiece: a 7,550-foot-long runway large enough for the 747 and its pachyderm passengers. Before he died in 2007, he lost control of a large part of the estate to an ex-wife who had begun to develop it into an uber-affluent fly-in community with residents including the actor-pilot John Travolta.