Welke Airport

StructureGNIS 1624139

Built

1965

Along road

East Side Drive · Hangar Road

Coordinates

45.7197° N, 85.5152° WGoogle Maps: Welke AirportDownload KML

Eras

Modern era

Concepts

transportationeconomytourismcommunity

Within

Beaver Island

Summary

Welke Airport (FAA identifier 6Y8) is a privately owned public-use airport at 36155 East Side Drive on Beaver Island, built by William P. “Bill” Welke beginning in 1965 on land his family held. It carries the Welke family name and was a fully licensed airfield by 1969, when the family moved to the island permanently; Welke’s own charter company, Welke Aviation, Inc., began FAA-certified operations from the field in 1975. The airport and the charter service both later passed into Island Airways, the company formed by Welke Aviation’s 1983 merger with the Charlevoix-based McPhillips Flying Service; the 2023 Beaver Island Master Plan identifies Island Airways as the airport’s current owner and operator. It is a distinct facility from the publicly owned Beaver Island Township Airport; a December 1975 Beacon advertising page lists “Welke Airport” and “Beaver Island Township Airport” as two separate entries. For the island’s broader air-service history — the operators, the emergency-flight program, and the annual Fly-In — see Aviation and air service, which this article does not restate.

History

A “Beaver Island Historical Map” published by the Beaver Island Historical Society in 1978, held as a community photograph and read directly for this article, labels the shoreline location that became the airport “Big Owen Gallagher’s (1860)… became the WELKE AIRPORT in 1965,” naming an earlier Gallagher-family homestead on the site. William P. “Bill” Welke’s own article cites a 1997 Beacon family retrospective dating the field’s origin to the same year, 1965, when the Welkes bought a farm from family friend Mel Gallagher and began building an airstrip on it; whether that 1965 purchase and the “Big Owen Gallagher’s (1860)” homestead on the map are the same property passed down within one family, or two distinct holdings, is not resolved by any source read for this article.

The family moved to Beaver Island permanently in 1969, by which date the strip was a fully licensed airport. Beacon business-directory listings attest the “Welke Airport” name by December 1972 — three years before Welke Aviation’s FAA operating certificate — so the field itself carried the family name before the certified airline did. In January 1975 a Beacon report on a proposed Charlevoix office quotes Welke telling a council that his company “presently owns a private airport on the Island.” That May–June, the Beacon reported Welke Aviation, Inc. flying passengers and freight from the field in a twin-engine Apache after receiving its FAA Air Taxi/Commercial Operator certificate — see Welke Aviation begins FAA-certified air-taxi and charter operation, 1975 for that event in full.

An October 3, 1976 Detroit Free Press feature on Beaver Island, read from the held photographs of the printed pages, independently describes the field in its early years as a rough grass runway. It quotes Welke — by then also a Charlevoix County deputy sheriff — recalling that he “landed on Beaver Island’s grass runway some years back and found it ‘rougher than a sonofabitch. I offered to grade the ground for them, and they said, “If you don’t like the airport, don’t use it.”’“ The same article says Welke, who had visited the island since childhood, “moved his family eight years ago into one of the island’s few remaining Mormon farmhouses, built his own airport, and opened his own flying service” — an outside, contemporary account that corroborates the family’s own retrospective on the private construction of the field and the approximate 1968–69 arrival date, without citing Mel Gallagher or a purchase date directly.

A September 2010 event flyer, held as a photograph and read directly for this article, gives the field’s full postal address — Welke Airport (6Y8), 36155 East Side Drive, Beaver Island, MI 49782 — for an FAA/Michigan Department of Transportation aviation safety seminar held there and co-sponsored by Welke Airport, Island Airways, the FAASTeam, and MDOT. A second flyer, for an October 10, 2015 “Island Airways Hangar Party” held “in the Big Hangar at Welke Airport,” marks the 40th anniversary of Welke Aviation (dating its founding to 1975, consistent with the FAA certificate that year) alongside the 70th anniversary of McPhillips Flying Service, Inc. (dating that company’s founding to 1945) — independent confirmation, from the airport’s own operator, of the 1975 founding date.

Names

The “Welke Airport” name is attested in Beacon business listings by December 1972. William Welke Sr., a New Boston, Michigan–born visitor who began coming to the island in 1936 and died on 2 June 1973, is named in his Beacon obituary as father of four sons including “William P. of St. James.” William P. “Bill” Welke’s own, more fully sourced article establishes him as the builder and namesake of the airfield; William Welke Sr. was his father, and the obituary does not itself connect the elder Welke to the airfield’s founding or ownership.

Description

The Beaver Island Master Plan (2023) describes Welke Airport, under Island Airways’ ownership and operation, as providing passenger and freight service between Beaver Island and Charlevoix, along with carriage of perishables, U.S. Postal Service mail, and shipping including prescription medication. It states that Island Airways, the Coast Guard, Northflight, and Guardian all provide emergency medical air transportation to Charlevoix Airport using specialized equipment, without assigning specific flights or dates to any one provider. The Master Plan places the field just south of East Side Drive, and a 2026 community operational notice records that East Side Drive can be closed at times near the airport during road work, and that the adjoining Hangar Road cannot be used at such times because it crosses an active runway — evidence of at least one runway oriented across Hangar Road, though no source read for this article gives a runway heading, length, or surface material at any date beyond the 1976 account of a grass strip.

Significance

Welke Airport was Beaver Island’s first privately built, family-owned airfield to host a certified commercial air-taxi operation, predating by years the more visible role Island Airways later took on for the island’s passenger, freight, mail, and emergency medical air service. Its history is inseparable from William P. Welke’s own — the field, the charter company, and his decades of civic and law-enforcement service on the island all begin from the same 1965–1969 arrival — and the fuller account of that arrival, the family’s 1997 retrospective, and Welke’s other work belongs to William P. "Bill" Welke rather than to this article.

Evidence and limits

The road links recorded in this article’s frontmatter are source-qualified spatial associations. They do not imply that every segment of either road is airport property, that Welke Road is an airport frontage road, or that the current runway layout is fully mapped here. The 1965 farm-purchase date and the identification of seller “Mel Gallagher” come from the 1997 family retrospective cited in William P. Welke’s article; this article does not independently verify that account against a deed or township record. The 1978 historical map’s claim that the site had earlier been “Big Owen Gallagher’s (1860)” is held here as an unreconciled second attestation, not adopted as fact — it was read directly from the held photograph, but it is itself a later, secondary compilation rather than a period record. The 1976 Detroit Free Press quotations were read directly from the held photographs of the printed pages rather than from a text OCR layer, and are quoted exactly as printed. No source read for this article states a construction date for any hangar, a runway length or heading at any date, or a formal transfer instrument for ownership passing from the Welke family to Island Airways.

Sources

See the sources: block above.

Added 2 August 2026 · revised 6 August 2026. Recent changes