Green Bay – Austin Straubel International Airport (GRB)

Click the map to go to Google Maps satellite view of this airport

Green Bay’s airport has an observation area – just a rough gravel fenced parking lot open from dusk to dawn – but there isn’t much here to see. The largest airline here is Delta and its regional affiliates with nearly half of the airport’s traffic. Other airlines include American Eagle and United Express, both offering service to Chicago, and Frontier.  The lot is at the north end of runway 6/24, just off of Highway 172. It is very difficult to photograph here in the winter simply because of the sun angle – you are looking almost directly at the sun from this parking lot during the winter months. Also, during the winter it gets too dark to photograph after about 4:00pm and most of the aircraft activity is in the afternoon between 5 and 7pm. The best time to photograph from this location at GRB is late afternoons from June to August. There is a seating area inside the terminal before the security checkpoints which offers a view of the ramp. It faces south so it is not an ideal location to photograph airplanes.

What little traffic there is is spread out throughout the day. During football season, and especially during September and October when the days are longer, you may even see some bigger planes like Delta’s Airbus A330 as they are the charter airline for the Green Bay Packers. Other than that I’d have to give this airport a low rating for plane lovers because there just isn’t much to see.

Interesting trivia: this airport was named for Lt. Col. Austin A. Straubel of Green Bay, an Army Air Force bombing squad company commander who was the first aviator from this area killed in action in February 1942 during World War 2.