The runway lights will be on early at the Carbon County Regional Airport on Saturday, September 12, 2026. Long before most of Price is awake, pilots will be rolling their planes out of the hangars, and the smell of frying bacon and pancakes will drift across the tarmac. It is the final Fly-In Breakfast of the year, the last of the monthly “Under the Wings” gatherings that have turned the airport into a community table all season. From 9:30 to 10:30 that morning, aviation enthusiasts, local families, and visiting pilots will gather in the shadow of the parked aircraft for a free breakfast, fresh coffee, and unhurried conversation. Breakfast is free, though donations are welcome, and pilots who fly in will find a full-service fuel discount waiting for them.
For the people of Carbon County, this is more than just a weekend social. It is the latest chapter in a relationship with flight that stretches back nearly a century — a story of a Depression-era dirt strip that once made Price the most air-minded small city in Utah, a hangar consumed by fire, and a beloved airport manager whose name still graces the field today.
The airport has changed names and locations over the years, but its heart has stayed constant. Today it operates as Carbon County Regional Airport, affectionately known as Buck Davis Field, a public facility owned and run by Carbon County, just a short drive from downtown Price. The fixed base operator — the airport’s service hub — is the Utah State Eastern Aviation Department, which keeps an on-site mechanic and fuel service for the general aviation traffic that passes through.
The roots of the September breakfast, however, run back only a few years — and in some sense only a few months. In February 2026, the airport held a pancake breakfast that was free and open to the community, with staff and volunteers serving pancakes, eggs, bacon, and drinks, and a few attendees even flying in for the occasion. Gary Burnham, who oversaw the event, told the local news outlet ETV News that the airport intended to expand the gathering to every third Saturday of the month. A donated food grill and trailer — the gift of a local company with the memorable name iGotPoop — helped make the ambitious new monthly schedule possible. “This is an event that we hope to continue and create more awareness for the airport and get the community involved,” Burnham said. He added that organizers were already eyeing an air show in the next year or two.
That February breakfast set the template for the season. By summer, the gatherings held under the label “Breakfast Under the Wings” had found their rhythm, hosted at the airport with the cooperation of the USU Eastern Aviation Services program and open to everyone. Early in the season, organizers asked for RSVPs so breakfast cooks could prepare enough food, and donations were appreciated but not required. Each date drew aircraft in from around the region, turning the ramp into a small impromptu air show of its own. The September 12 event closes out that first full season of monthly fly-in breakfasts, a fitting send-off as autumn cools the high desert.
The scene on the ramp would have been familiar — in spirit, if not in machinery — to the aviators who put Price on Utah’s aviation map in the early 1930s. As a Deseret News retrospective recalls, the Great Depression years were oddly hopeful ones for flight. In 1933, fourteen Utah communities applied for Civil Works Administration funding to build a statewide network of airports, part of a ten-million-dollar national program to lay down two thousand landing fields. Aviation was catching the popular imagination, and Price threw itself into the wave. The city lured Jimmy R. Lund, a celebrated Los Angeles pilot with more than nine thousand hours of flight time, to start a flight school with his Whirlwind Waco airplane. A dirt strip was roughed out on about 540 acres of leased land a mile southwest of town, and on September 9, 1933, state and federal officials formally dedicated it.
Almost immediately, the field was a sensation. C. R. Ferguson, owner of the Carbon Ice Cream Company, earned the distinction of being the first to solo and promptly bought his own airplane. Others followed, including a young J. Bracken Lee, who would go on to serve as mayor of Price and later of Salt Lake City. The local newspaper, the Sun Advocate, boasted that Carbon County Airport had more private aviation activity than any field in the state even though it had been operating only about six months. It counted twenty-one students who had logged more than three hundred hours of flying, and the field had accommodated some four hundred passengers without a single accident or injury. In just over half a year, Price had earned a reputation, in the paper’s words, as “the most air-minded city in the state.”
Then, less than five months after its dedication, tragedy nearly undid it all. In the early hours of Sunday, January 21, 1934, fire gutted the hangar and destroyed three airplanes, causing damage the county, uninsured, had little cushion to absorb. Arson was suspected at first, and the setback “kind of cooled things off,” as veteran pilot Ralph Woodhouse remembered. But the truth, when it emerged two weeks later, was a less sinister and more human story. Three young men confessed to starting the fire by accident while stealing gasoline. The Sun Advocate printed one boy’s account: filling cans from a barrel in the dark hangar, the teens had struck matches to see; the gas flashed, and a burning can was dropped as they fled to their car and drove home to bed. They were charged with second-degree burglary.
The community rallied. Carbon County, the city of Price, and surrounding towns raised more than $600, joined by a $4,161 CWA grant, to build a new rock-and-steel hangar dedicated in October 1934. The airport was back in business, the resilience of the county matching the optimism of its pilots.
The field grew with the times. After World War II, the county enlarged and extended the runways with federal help and matching funds, and in October 1948 construction crews finished the work. More than five thousand people turned out for the dedication, where an air show featured planes from the U.S. Air Force, Castle Valley Flying Service, and Carbon-Emery Flying Service, along with parachute jumps over the field and courtesy flights over Castle Valley. Not coincidentally, the guest speakers included J. Bracken Lee, by then a gubernatorial candidate — the same man who had soloed there as a young flier years before.
The airport eventually moved from its original site to its present location, where it became the province of one remarkable manager: E. L. “Buck” Davis, who promoted and ran the field for many years. Davis was known for looking out for passengers, famously policing the taxi drivers so they would not overcharge travelers for the two-mile ride into Price. The airport’s current name, Buck Davis Field, honors his decades of stewardship. After his retirement came the energy boom years, when corporate jets and charter traffic briefly transformed the sleepy field — Carbon-Emery Aviation bought new airplanes and hired a chief pilot, a flight instructor ran a class of thirty students that included miners, businessmen, and homemakers, and Trans West Airline even wanted to open commuter service. When the boom faded, the airport settled back into its familiar general-aviation routine.
These days that routine includes the students of the USU Eastern aviation program, who train over the Castle Valley skies. The September 12 Fly-In Breakfast is, in a way, both a farewell to summer and a promise of continuity — a chance for the community that fought to keep its airport through fire and hardship to gather once more under the wings. As the last pancakes are finished and the visiting pilots button up their planes for the flight home, the field at Price will close the 2026 fly-in season the way it has for the better part of a century: on the ground, yes, but with its eyes fixed on the horizon.