A Chattanooga businessman is scrapping and rethinking plans for a pair of fly-in communities after costs escalated, permitting took longer than anticipated and banks lost their appetite for high-end residential projects, he said.
“As a pilot, it makes me sad,” Craig Fuller, the CEO of the trucking analytics company FreightWaves, said in a phone interview. “We spent a lot of time. We spent a lot of money, and we’re going to eat all that, frankly, but at the end of the day, it is what it is.”
In 2022, Fuller was contemplating a luxury fly-in resort and residential community in Bledsoe County dubbed The Fields at Fall Creek. Plans called for the development of 800 homes, many with aircraft hangars, over the course of 20 years. It would have also featured a 4,200-foot airstrip.
The project would have sat on a 1,500 acre tract off Old Highway 28 in the Sequatchie Valley, about 30 miles north of Chattanooga. The first phase of development would have included 100 homes starting at $500,000 each.
In 2023, Fuller was also considering a separate project that would have turned the Dallas Bay Skypark into a small, private fly-in community — also featuring an air strip with hangars and about 80 residential units. Townhomes and detached homes would have likely started at around $700,000 each.