Zoning Near Camp Lejeune and the Airport in Onslow County, North Carolina

A 100-foot height cap near Albert J. Ellis Airport

Onslow County's Zoning Ordinance (adopted June 21, 2021, and set out in Article 9, Additional Required Standards) imposes a flat 100-foot height restriction on all structures located within 10,000 feet of Albert J. Ellis Airport property -- the county's own commercial-service airport, north of Jacksonville. That distance covers a meaningful ring of land around the airport, well beyond the airport's own boundary, and the restriction applies regardless of what your underlying zoning district would otherwise allow for building height. If you're planning anything unusually tall on a parcel in that ring -- a communications tower, grain elevator, or even a tall agricultural structure -- confirm the exact airport property boundary and your parcel's distance from it with Onslow County Planning and Development before finalizing plans.

A mandatory FAA filing near the airport, MCAS New River, or Camp Lejeune

Separately, and covering a much larger radius, the ordinance requires that any development proposal with any portion located within 20,000 feet of the runway surfaces of Albert J. Ellis Airport, MCAS New River, or Camp Lejeune -- or within a county-designated Flight Path Overlay District (FPOD) -- come with a copy of an actual Federal Aviation Administration determination, obtained by filing FAA Form 7460-1 (Notice of Proposed Construction or Alteration). The applicant then has to affirmatively demonstrate to the county that the proposal will not adversely affect the restricted airspace tied to flight paths serving all three of those facilities. Twenty thousand feet is roughly 3.8 miles -- a substantially larger area than the 100-foot height-cap ring above, meaning a parcel can be well outside the strict height limit and still trigger the FAA-filing requirement simply because of its proximity to a runway or its location inside a mapped FPOD.

In practice, that means the FAA filing requirement is the one to check first for a much wider swath of the county than the height cap alone would suggest -- particularly for land near MCAS New River (west of Jacksonville) and Camp Lejeune's runway infrastructure, not just the civilian airport. The FAA's own review under Form 7460-1 looks at whether a proposed structure could constitute a hazard to air navigation, which is a separate federal process layered on top of, not a substitute for, Onslow County's own zoning sign-off.

What this means before you buy or build

If a parcel you're evaluating sits anywhere within a few miles of Albert J. Ellis Airport, MCAS New River, or Camp Lejeune's runway areas, don't assume standard county zoning rules are the only constraint on what you can build. Ask Onslow County Planning and Development directly: (1) whether your specific parcel falls within the 10,000-foot Albert J. Ellis height-restriction ring, (2) whether it falls within the 20,000-foot FAA-filing radius of any of the three installations, and (3) whether it sits inside a currently mapped Flight Path Overlay District, since FPOD boundaries can exist independently of the distance-based thresholds. Budget real time for the FAA Form 7460-1 process if it applies -- a federal airspace determination is not something the county controls the timeline for, and it needs to be resolved before the county will sign off on a building permit for an affected structure.

This overlay framework is separate from, and in addition to, the general fact (covered on the county hub) that a very large share of Onslow County's total land area is occupied outright by Camp Lejeune and the Hofmann Forest and therefore isn't available to buy at all. The zoning rules described here apply to privately held land near those federal boundaries -- not to the federal land itself.