COLUMBUS, Ohio—The Cleveland Browns’ proposed stadium near Cleveland Hopkins International Airport is being held up amid concerns from airport officials that the stadium would obstruct air traffic.
But it’s not the first time that a pro sports stadium project has been held up due to airspace concerns. And it doesn’t mean the stadium won’t ultimately be built.
What seems clear is there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to whether and how the Browns can overcome such a hurdle.
In this case, the FAA gave its approval to the plan, but state aviation regulators at the Ohio Department of Transportation pushed back, saying that “the proposed structure has been determined to be an obstruction to air navigation.”
The state investigated in response to concerns raised by Cleveland’s director of port control, who oversees Hopkins.
The Browns have expressed confusion with the state’s decision, at odds with the Federal Aviation Administration’s conclusion. The team is considering options.
There have been several times in recent years where stadium plans near airports have run into trouble from aviation regulators or airline officials have expressed concern about them creating a hazard for airplanes, an analysis from The Plain Dealer/cleveland.com found.
In some cases, stadium projects were abandoned and moved to another location. But in other situations, proposed stadiums ended up being built after team owners and aviation officials negotiated workarounds.
Taken together, what’s happened in other cities suggests that determining whether a new stadium would obstruct air traffic is based on a complex set of factors.
“I can see all sides are annoyed,” said veteran aviation consultant Mike Boyd, president of Colorado-based Boyd Group International. “You’re talking about a couple of yardsticks worth of height torpedoing a (stadium) project. But I also understand that there’s safety involved.
“If they put their heads together,” Boyd said, “they might be able to do something.”
Stadium plans gone awry
In 2001, the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals, along with the state’s new sports and tourism authority, backed building a stadium in Tempe, near Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport.
But two days after the proposed stadium’s location was announced, Sky Harbor officials objected, asserting the 170-foot-tall stadium would “severely impact” planes landing at the airport’s largest runway, directly west of the stadium site, according to KPNX-TV.
While state officials responded by proposing to lower the stadium field 36 feet underground, the Federal Aviation Administration ruled the stadium would be a “hazard,” the TV station reported.
While the FAA couldn’t force construction to stop, state officials halted work at the stadium site due to concerns that the hazard designation would leave them open to legal action.
Ultimately, the Cardinals’ new home – now called State Farm Stadium – was built on the other side of the Phoenix area, in suburban Glendale – a 40-minute drive from Sky Harbor airport.
Fifteen years later, in 2016, developers looking to build a football stadium in Las Vegas to attract an NFL team chose a site about one-third of a mile from runways at Harry Reid International Airport (then called McCarran International Airport).
But while the FAA determined the new stadium wouldn’t affect air traffic, the stadium site was abandoned after Southwest Airlines complained that the stadium would distract pilots and create more highway traffic for travelers trying to get to and from the terminal.
Instead, the Oakland Raiders – who agreed to relocate to Las Vegas – ended up choosing another site about a mile away from the airport. The 225-foot-tall stadium that now stands on that site, Allegiant Stadium, also received FAA approval and opened in 2020.
Overcoming turbulence
However, when airspace concerns are raised about a proposed stadium project, that doesn’t automatically mean such plans are dead.
In early 2015, the owner of the NFL’s St. Louis Rams announced plans to move the team to Los Angeles and build a new stadium in suburban Inglewood, about two miles from Los Angeles International Airport, one of the nation’s busiest.
But later that year, the FAA ruled that the new stadium would be a hazard to LAX air traffic, based on concerns about its location and that the stadium’s shiny exterior could interfere with the airport’s radar system.
After negotiations between the FAA and the team, a deal was struck in which the FAA lifted its hazard declaration in exchange for Rams owners agreeing to pay $29 million for a new secondary radar system for LAX. The new stadium, SoFi Stadium, opened in 2020.
In March, the FAA gave the OK for another proposed Las Vegas stadium: a new, domed baseball stadium about half a mile from the football stadium site that Southwest Airlines complained about in 2016.
The 320-foot-high stadium is expected to open in 2028 as the new home of the (formerly) Oakland Athletics.
Citi Field in New York opened in 2009, replacing Shea Stadium, which had stood on adjacent property since the mid-1960s. The stadium, 218 feet tall, is home to the New York Mets.
The stadium is only about 1.5 miles across Flushing Bay from LaGuardia Airport, ranked among the 20 busiest U.S. airports in 2024.
FAA documents showed that a review of the plans found “the structure would have no substantial adverse effect on the safe and efficient utilization of the navigable airspace by aircraft or on the operation of air navigation facilities.” That’s the same conclusion the FAA found for the proposed Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park.
The FAA determined that -- as with the Browns’ planned stadium -- Citi Field would not be a hazard to air traffic so long as proper lighting and markings were used to warn aircraft of a possible obstruction.
An FAA also gave approval in 1997, with no restrictions, for construction of the Cleveland Browns’ current lakefront home, now called Huntington Bank Field. The 176-foot-tall stadium was built on the site of old Cleveland Municipal Stadium, which opened in 1931.
Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland opened in the 1940s less than a mile northeast of where Huntington Bank Field now stands.
Burke doesn’t serve large scheduled commercial flights but is rather a general-aviation airport used by corporate jets, charter flights, small planes and for flight training. The land on which the airport sits juts out slightly further into the lake than the stadium property, and the runways are not directly in line with the stadium.
What happens now with the Browns?
It remains to be seen what will happen with the proposed Browns stadium, which the team is looking to build just east of Cleveland Hopkins airport, across from the Ohio 237 highway in the suburb of Brook Park.
The new Browns stadium, unlike some of the stadium projects at issue in other cities, wouldn’t be directly in line with any airport runways. Rather, it would be located nearly directly across the highway from the airport terminal.
However, Bryant Francis, the Cleveland Airport System’s director of airports, notified the state in March that the proposed stadium would “negatively” affect airport operations, including by forcing airport officials to revise minimum altitudes for aircraft landing approaches, as well as impairing pilots’ view of one of the airport’s runways.
Francis’ objections led the Ohio Department of Transportation to deny a construction permit for the Browns to build a new stadium at their proposed site unless the team either reduces the proposed 221-foot-tall stadium by at least 58 feet or relocates the stadium site farther away from the airport.
A Browns spokesman says the team is talking with state officials about how to resolve the issues.
Kenneth Quinn, the team’s attorney and former chief counsel of the FAA, noted that exceeding height limits is not unusual and that 31 other structures already exceed “surface” rules around Hopkins
Asked how much of a difference, in general, building a proposed stadium behind an airport terminal can affect the maximum allowed height of the stadium, FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said there’s no uniform answer.
“It’s a case-by-case basis, based on the paths into and out of the airport,” he said.
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