Purdue University Airport Guide

Purdue University Airport sits about two nautical miles southwest of downtown Lafayette, in West Lafayette, Indiana. Purdue University owns it. The airport serves the university community, local businesses and a large general aviation base, and it supports Purdue's aviation and aeronautical engineering programs.

The airport's history starts in 1930, when David E. Ross donated land to Purdue for an aeronautical education facility. The federal government named the field an emergency landing strip that November. Two asphalt runways serve it today. Runway 10/28 is 6,600 feet long and runway 5/23 is 4,225 feet long. The airport logged 117,727 aircraft operations in the 12 months to the end of 2019, about 322 a day.

Airline service has come and gone. The airport lost Essential Air Service funding in 1999, partly because of its closeness to Indianapolis International Airport, and scheduled flights later stopped. Service returned in May 2024 under Southern Airways Express. In August 2025 SkyWest took over as United Express and began flying 50-seat CRJ200 jets to Chicago O'Hare. Purdue reports nearly 28,000 passengers in the first year of that service, which runs under a two-year agreement approved by the university's Board of Trustees.