The Shoreline Approach
The Shoreline Approach
Coastal airports and the pilots who fly them. Small strips at the edge of the working waterfront, where the ramp sits a hundred yards from the crab houses.
About the Collection
The crab got there first.
When an airplane flies a crosswind approach, it points its nose into the wind and travels sideways down the runway centerline. Pilots call this crabbing. The word is not a metaphor somebody reached for — it is a description. The maneuver was named after the animal, because the animal was doing it first, in the same water the runway was eventually built beside.
The Shoreline Approach is built on that overlap. Every design in this collection pairs a real coastal general-aviation airport with the working waterfront it sits on. KEWN and the Neuse. KTGI and the crab shanties on Tangier. KAAF and the oyster boats in Apalachicola Bay. These are small strips where the ramp is a short walk from the water, and where the people tying down airplanes and the people running trotlines have known each other their whole lives.
We render them in the register of a vintage aviation manual — the diagram linework, the placard type, the flat and honest color of a 1960s pilot operating handbook. Not a painting of an airplane. A document about one.
Every identifier on these shirts is a real airport you can fly into tomorrow. That matters. A pilot reading the back of one of these should be able to say I have been there, and be right.
What's Next
The Series Continues
Coming Soon
- Main Ridge — Tangier Island, Virginia
In Development
- The Last Approach — Port Isabel, Texas
- Cedar & Salt — Cedar Key, Florida
- Low Country Turn — Beaufort, South Carolina
Real airports. Real identifiers. Flown, not imagined.
Explore All Collections