Expanding playground
The site runs to a little over 100 acres and started off as just a runway. Then came cabins to house students, and then cabins to house tourists on scenic flights.
The cabins got rigged out with heated floors and towel bars and “everything fancy,” he says. “And then, like, let’s one up that. It would be cool if we got an old airplane to turn into a house. Let’s make it really nice and put a Jacuzzi on the wing and a barbecue grill. Let’s get two more and have three of them.”
They built a second runway and a hangar for this expanding playground. “I have a tendency to go a little overboard,” he chuckles.
“It’s fun, whether it’s grown adults just in awe of the place, or it’s kids running up and down the whole length of the airplane, going crazy and running to the cockpit,” he says. “It’s frustrating and stressful and overwhelming and expensive to do these things – but it’s rewarding.”
The first plane to be converted was the US-built 1950s DC-6, which in a previous life flew freight and fuel to remote villages around Alaska.
Now it’s a two-bed, one-bath stay, with a fire pit on the wing deck, with Airbnb prices around $448 a night.
Bookings have just opened for the DC-9, which is three-bed, two-bath, and has a sauna, жесткое русское порно hot tub and heated floors. It can host seven guests and prices are around $849 a night.
Work is underway too on the newest addition, a Boeing 727, which will be a lodge space for guests to congregate.
There’ll “be a big kitchen in there, big dining room table. People can have meals together,” says Kotwicki. “We’ll have a hot tub on the wings, couches. The tail of it, I’m really excited for because that’ll be a rooftop deck” with a “nice little fire pit to hang out and everything.”
Kotwicki has recently bought a fourth plane. It’s a Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar, a military transport aircraft produced from 1949 to 1955, which he says is “so ugly, it’s cool.”
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