A plan to put about 44 aircraft hangars on city land at Denton Enterprise Airport has fallen through, and city staff have negotiated a way out of the lease.
The Airport Advisory Board will review a settlement and mutual release with Hangar Club LLC, which does business as High Flying Hangars, when it meets Wednesday, Oct. 14, in the terminal building meeting room at 5000 Airport Road. Staff are asking the board to recommend that the City Council approve it.
What was planned
The council approved a 40-year ground lease with Hangar Club on June 17, 2025, for 7.91 acres known as Sites 3 and 4. The company was to build roughly 44 hangars covering at least 110,000 square feet and pay $155,109.15 a year in rent. The lease required construction to begin within 400 days of its start date.
On July 7 of this year, Hangar Club formally told the city it did not expect to meet that deadline, according to the agenda information sheet. After several weeks of talks about options, the company decided to seek an end to the lease.
How the exit works
Airport ground leases have no early termination clause, so the two sides wrote a settlement instead. Under it, Hangar Club would be released from its obligations and return the land in substantially the condition it received it. In exchange, it would keep making its scheduled monthly rent payments through March 31, 2027.
Staff describe that window as roughly the time the city would need to put the property back out for proposals and, if a qualifying one comes in, lease it again. Hangar Club would also hand the city its license agreement with U.S. Aviation, which lets that company use part of the site for temporary vehicle parking.
The city would stop collecting the $155,109.15 in annual rent starting April 1, 2027. Staff say that loss is already built into the 2026-27 budget.
