SoCal Airport History

[rtataryn]

Pilot and aviation history buff, Paul Freeman, has put an incredible amount of work into his website of abandoned airfields. http://www.airfields-freeman.com Anyone interested in this kind of thing will find it fascinating reading and could spend hours sorting through it.

I was quite amazed at the number of previous airfields in west LA and the LAX corridor area. This sectional chart snippet from 1949 shows twenty airfields between Santa Monica and Long Beach.

1949 Sectional Chart

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It's hard to imagine another airport fitting in between KSMO and KLAX, but Hughes had a 9100 ft runway just a mile north of KLAX for his Culver City plant.

This is from a 1980 sectional chart.

1980 Sectional Chart

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Apparently, in the 1970's, a Quantas airliner bound for LAX lined up mistakenly for Hughes Runway 23 and its pilot finally realized his mistake at about 500', resulting in a go-around. After that incident, controllers at LAX insisted that all arrivals first line up on the instrument approaches, before being cleared for visual approaches.

Hughes Airfield 1977

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[Keith Smith]

Very cool, thanks for posting those. It really is amazing to think that they had another field between SMO and LAX as late as the 80's, I had no idea.

I've perused that site before, looking at airports in the NE, but I never thought to check Socal. Great stuff!

[Kyle.Sanders]

It's weird seeing old sectional formats...
INSTR LDG SYSTEM
TOP OF BLDG Elev.

[rtataryn]

Yeah, no kidding. Can you imagine adding a 4th tower to call on the mini-route?

Here's a picture of Hughes in 1972 with the facility fully active.

Hughes Airport 1972

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Here's an aerial from last year, with the last of the condos going in on the east end of the old runway.

Hughes Airport 2015

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[Ryan B]

Very cool. I always like to scour google satellite views and find old strips or old strips that might have existed.