Peter O. Knight Airport — Tampa, Florida

Peter O. Knight Airport is the small general aviation field at the southern tip of Davis Islands, in Hillsborough Bay close to downtown Tampa. The Hillsborough County Aviation Authority owns it and lists it under the code TPF, one of three general aviation airports the authority runs beside Tampa International Airport. Today it handles private and training aircraft rather than airline service.

For about a decade it was something larger. According to catalog notes in the USF Libraries Florida Photograph Collection, the airport on Davis Islands was built mainly by money from the Works Progress Administration in 1935, and both Eastern and National Airlines flew from it until 1946, when they moved to Drew Field, now Tampa International Airport. Between those dates, the Davis Islands runways were where a Tampa air traveler boarded a scheduled flight.

The field carries the name of Peter Oliphant Knight, a Tampa lawyer and the president of Tampa Electric Company from 1924 to 1946, who represented the Boston firm that took over Davis Islands after its developer lost control of the project. The sections below trace how the airport was built, why it held the city's airline traffic through World War II, why it lost that role, and what has happened at TPF since the 1960s.

The idea predates the airport by several years. Writing for the Davis Islands Civic Association, Tampa Bay History Center curator Rodney Kite-Powell records that a Downtown Airport for Tampa was first proposed in 1930 and that construction began in June 1934, one of many projects funded by the Works Progress Administration. The site was the southeastern end of Davis Islands, then a thinly built development where much of the dredged land still lay empty.

Building a runway there reshaped the islands themselves. The City of Tampa neighborhood page explains that Davis Islands began as three islands and that, when the airport went in, the end of one canal was filled in to make enough land for a runway. That fill joined the two largest pieces of Davis Islands at their southern ends, which is why the neighborhood now counts two islands rather than three.

The finished Peter O. Knight Airport was more than a strip of pavement. USF catalog notes say it originally had a restaurant and dance floor, and Kite-Powell's Then and Now column describes a terminal of coquina block construction from the 1930s, with a seaplane basin built so the Davis Islands field could handle international air travel. A Florida Works Progress Administration photograph dated March 3, 1938 shows the empty airport with its towered administration building, and a Burgert Brothers view of July 9, 1938, shot across the water, is catalogued by USF under both airports and seaplane bases.

Peter O. Knight served as Tampa's commercial airport from its 1935 opening until 1946. During those years Eastern Air Lines and National Airlines scheduled their Tampa flights through the Davis Islands terminal, so the field was the city's front door for air passengers in the late 1930s and through World War II.

Photographs from the period show the scale of the operation. A Burgert Brothers image dated March 30, 1939 shows a twin propeller airliner on the apron in front of the administration building, with spectators standing by a car. A 1940 Robertson and Fresh aerial shows a cross-shaped airfield on Davis Islands surrounded by water and marshland, and a Gandy aerial from the 1940s captures the runways and terminal buildings while a cargo ship moves through the adjacent channel.

World War II briefly put the airport's future in question. Kite-Powell's history of Davis Islands in the war years explains that the Army Air Corps took over two of Tampa's municipal airports, Drew Field and Henderson Field, leaving Peter O. Knight as the only Tampa airfield open to commercial and private planes. Officials proposed closing it for the duration as a security measure, which would have ended civilian air travel across much of the Tampa Bay area. The Tampa Aero Club campaigned against the closure and won, and passenger and private planes kept using the Davis Islands field throughout the war.

Being the only civilian field open in wartime Tampa exposed the airport's limits. According to the Davis Islands Civic Association history, it was apparent to some local aviation boosters as early as 1943 that the Davis Islands airport was too small for the larger passenger planes then coming into service. Hemmed in by Hillsborough Bay and the residential streets of Davis Islands, the runways had little room to grow.

Boosters first looked north. Some who had fought to keep Peter O. Knight open now wanted Henderson Field, near Temple Terrace in northern Hillsborough County, to become the county's international airport after the war. County construction there had started before the United States entered the war, but the War Department intervened before it was finished.

In the end neither field won. Drew Field, which had existed since the 1920s and was expanded by the Army Air Corps during the war, became Tampa International Airport in 1947, and Eastern and National had already shifted their flights there in 1946. Henderson Field's runways faded into the area later occupied by Busch Gardens, while Peter O. Knight settled into its lasting role serving small private planes from Davis Islands.

The Historical Monument Trail of the Friends of the Tampa Riverwalk gives Peter Oliphant Knight's dates as 1865 to 1946. Born in Pennsylvania and trained in law at Valparaiso University, he came to Florida in 1884, helped incorporate Fort Myers and served as its mayor, then moved to Tampa in 1889 as law partner to Hillsborough County State Senator Joseph B. Wall. In Tampa he sat on the City Council, served as Hillsborough County solicitor, and was state attorney for Hillsborough County from 1893 to 1899.

Knight's business ties ran through much of early twentieth century Tampa. The Riverwalk biography lists him as attorney for the Ybor City Land and Improvement Company and for several railroads, an organizer of the Exchange National Bank and the Tampa Gas Company, and the primary local representative of Stone and Webster, the Boston company that took over and promoted Davis Islands. He was president of Tampa Electric Company from 1924 to 1946.

That Davis Islands connection explains the airport's name. The Riverwalk trail notes that the municipal airport on Davis Islands, for which Knight helped secure financing, bears his name, as does his former house on Hyde Park Avenue, now home to the Tampa Historical Society. The same biography records that he had detractors as well as supporters, including cigar workers who opposed his consistent backing of factory owners during labor disputes in Ybor City.

The original coquina block terminal did not survive the jet age. USF catalog notes record that the first administration building at Peter O. Knight Airport was demolished and replaced in 1965, and the Davis Islands Civic Association describes the change as a move from the 1930s structure to the current modern design while the airport kept the same basic mission.

Growth has brought friction with Davis Islands neighbors. In November 2007 the Tampa Tribune, republished by Aviation Pros, reported that the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority said it had to extend the larger and busier of the two runways by 175 feet to meet federal aviation safety requirements, pushing its end closer to homes on Severin and Martinique avenues. The authority offered to bar touch and go training between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., and planned new hangars along the Seddon Channel side of the 110 acre property. Supporters argued that some inconvenience was better than seeing the land redeveloped.

The low waterfront site was tested in 2024. The Tampa International Airport newsroom reported that TPF was inundated with three to four feet of storm surge when Hurricane Helene passed offshore of Tampa Bay on September 26, 2024, damaging runway lighting and hangars with salt water, and that Hurricane Milton added wind damage on October 9. Runway lights were fully repaired the week of Thanksgiving, taxiway lights followed, and night flights resumed at Peter O. Knight in early December 2024. The authority's other general aviation airports, Tampa Executive and Plant City Airport, were damaged less severely.