Triple Tree Aerodrome, the Grass Strip in the South Carolina Piedmont, and the Fly-In That Feels Like Coming Home

Triple Tree Aerodrome in Woodruff, South Carolina hosts one of the Southeast’s most enduring grass-strip fly-ins every Labor Day weekend. The Timms family has welcomed pilots to this private field for more than twenty years, making it a genuine institution - not a production, not a sponsored event, but a community that has earned its staying power one September at a time.

What Is Triple Tree Aerodrome?

Triple Tree is a private grass airstrip tucked into the South Carolina piedmont, roughly an hour southwest of Charlotte. The land is red clay, loblolly pine, and long rolling horizons - classic piedmont country that softens as you cross south of Spartanburg.

The annual fly-in runs on volunteer labor and community loyalty. There is no marketing department. There is no corporation behind it. There is a family and a few hundred pilots who have decided this thing is worth showing up to defend, year after year, and that is exactly why it works.

The Arrival: Flying Into a Grass Strip

When Triple Tree comes into view on approach, it registers almost as a surprise - a green rectangle among farm fields, trees on three sides, the windsock at the departure end doing a lazy turn. The runway numbers are mown into the grass and clearly readable. Someone has been taking care of this place.

During the fly-in, Triple Tree operates under published arrival procedures, and they matter. The field gets genuinely busy. The NOTAM covers everything: pattern altitude, runway in use, frequency, arrival corridor. Read it before you leave home and fly it as written.

The approach from the south comes over a tree line. Carry a little extra speed for the grass surface, get established early, and be ready to work the rudder more than usual through the roll-out. A grass landing has a rumble and a slight unpredictability that pavement never does - the airplane wants to follow any low spot in the turf, and it takes roughly the first hundred feet to recalibrate what your hands know. After that, it smooths out. Land on grass once and you will understand immediately why tailwheel airplanes exist.

The Ramp: What You’ll Find on the Field

By Friday afternoon, the field held more than 200 aircraft - parked in long rows in the turf, wingtip to wingtip, with camps running between the rows. Every aircraft type imaginable, from pre-war classics to carbon fiber experimentals built last winter.

Notable sightings included a Beechcraft Staggerwing cooling casually in the afternoon heat while its owner read in a camp chair beside it, a Globe Swift in ivory and burgundy paint that belonged in a museum, and a Pitts Special in orange and white that looked factory-fresh. A North American Harvard had its cowl removed, and the owner was delivering what amounted to a graduate seminar on radial engine maintenance to a crowd of fifteen pilots.

The homebuilt section is where Triple Tree shows its real identity. EAA chapters from across the South treat this fly-in as a reunion, because for many of them it is. Zenith 750s with cockpit interiors that would embarrass some certified aircraft. RV-8 instrument panels that clearly went through multiple revisions before the builder got it exactly right - and you could see all that thinking in the final result.

The Sonex Builder

The most memorable aircraft on the field was also one of the simplest: a Sonex that had taken six years to build.

The builder had a full-time job and two kids. His wife had negotiated one shelf in the garage for the duration - just one shelf, hers for the entire six years, and they had both kept to it. The airplane flew for the first time twenty-two days before this fly-in. He had known for four years that the first September it was airworthy, he was pointing it at Triple Tree.

Twenty-two days after first flight, he pointed it south and came to South Carolina. He stood next to the airplane and kept glancing at it, checking that it was still there. When asked what the first flight felt like, he said: “I kept thinking, I built this. I built this and it flies. I’ve been up six times now and it still doesn’t get old.”

That is the story of Triple Tree, distilled.

Camping on the Ramp

Your tent goes right next to your aircraft. There is no transient parking and a quarter-mile walk to a campground. Your parking spot is your campsite. When you unzip the tent in the morning, your airplane is the first thing you see.

That sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing.

Friday evenings shift from arrival energy to settling-in energy. Food vendors open along the tree line - pulled pork, corn on the cob, the kind of food that tastes best eaten outside with grass under your feet. A band plays, not loud, and pilots spread across the field in loose groups as the shadows go long.

The conversations are worth the trip alone. A single evening at Triple Tree might put you in the same circle as a retired naval aviator, a crop duster from Alabama with more hours in agricultural aircraft than most airline captains accumulate in any single type, and a 23-year-old who soloed two months ago and is still vibrating from it. A conversation about crosswind technique that lasted nearly an hour, with nobody agreeing about anything and everybody learning something.

Saturday Morning and the Airshow

Saturday mornings have their own ritual. Someone is always up early with a turning engine. The coffee line forms while the low light does things to aluminum and fabric that explain why people paint pictures of airplanes. Dew is on everything.

The Saturday airshow is the centerpiece of the weekend, and it offers something big airshows cannot replicate. The audience is pilots. When an aerobatic pilot came around the pattern inverted at 500 feet, the crowd went silent - not the silence of people who didn’t understand what they were seeing, but the silence of people who understood exactly, doing the math in their heads. When he pulled through, the crowd exhaled together. Someone said, “he took that low.” Three people immediately said, “yes he did” - not critical, just noticing. That is the audience at Triple Tree. They are inside the performance.

Planning Your Visit: Practical Information

Triple Tree Aerodrome is near Woodruff, South Carolina, roughly an hour southwest of Charlotte.

Critical planning notes:

No fuel on field. Plan your reserves accordingly for arrival and departure.
The fly-in runs over Labor Day weekend.
Fly the published arrival procedures. The NOTAM has everything: pattern altitude, runway in use, frequency, arrival corridor. Read it before departure.
Volunteers are managing the operation from before you arrive to after you leave. Be a good neighbor on the frequency and follow their guidance without argument.

The Triple Tree Fly-In website has current planning information for each year’s event.

Key Takeaways

Triple Tree Aerodrome hosts a 20-plus year tradition of grass-strip, pilot-camping fly-ins every Labor Day weekend near Woodruff, SC - run entirely by the Timms family and volunteers.
No fuel is available on field. Fuel planning is the pilot’s responsibility.
Published arrival procedures and NOTAMs are mandatory reading, not suggestions - the field gets busy and volunteers are counting on pilots to do their homework.
The ramp holds a cross-section of aviation history: warbirds, homebuilts, classics, and experimentals, all parked side by side in the grass.
Camping is next to your aircraft - not in a separate area - and that single detail defines the entire experience.