[8] Pro Air, a scheduled passenger airline, was based at the airport and grounded by the FAA due to poor maintenance performance after less than a year.
A few years later Southwest Airlines ended operations there, citing the city's inability to keep its promises and the need for longer runways to allow for larger jets.
[7][17][18] In 1988, complaints were registered because the city removed/discarded several families' memorial statuary without notification, replacing them with simple flat in-ground markers, stating that the statues posed a collision risk should an airplane go off the end of the runway.
Satellite photos still show some ruins of the original roadbed and a driveway to a motel and topless bar that occupied the south side of McNichols near Conner.
A tunneling project could in the future restore the severed East McNichols Road connection and allow an additional 405 feet (123 m) of the main runway to be used for aviation.
[20] In light of a resurgence of the Detroit's finances in the 2010s, the city council with its airport task force started looking at options for investing into the facility's future.
Contributing to the Airport Redevelopment and Modernization Program were consulting companies Avion Solutions[21] and Kimley-Horn, and included were officials of the Michigan Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration.
This could limit the options to conduct training flights, relevant in light of plans to locate the Davis Technical Aerospace High School and other educational and commercial users on the airport grounds.
[2][25] For the 12-month period ending December 31, 2021, the airport had 32,850 aircraft operations, an average of 90 per day: 96% general aviation, 3% air taxi, <1% commercial, and 1% military.
Since 1994, the city has been working on clearing a federally mandated safety buffer of at least 750 feet (230 m) from the airport's main runway by incrementally buying adjacent land.
Budget cuts in 2012 closed Engine Company 20, previously equipped with at least one aircraft rescue and firefighting vehicle, leaving the airport fire station unstaffed.