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Pre-Flight

Photo of Vince Basehart

By Vince Basehart

June 21 -- “Rudder?” “Check.” “Yaw control?” “Check.” “Aileron?” “Check.”

I imagine this conversation between the pilot and his co-pilot as I watch them go through a pre-flight safety inspection of their Cessna idling on the tarmac of the Santa Monica Airport. The smell of av-gas fumes pouring out the exhaust is delicious (think warm sake).

This is the kind of place which Chuck Yeager would love, with flying-craft aplenty and aviation history galore.

Rows of tiny propeller driven planes are parked along one side of the long runway. Among them is an aerobatic plane which looks like an oversized toy, with outsized wings and a bulbous shape, painted in circus colors.

Here is an experimental aircraft, shaped like a giant Y, with the propeller in the rear designed to push, not pull, the plane through the air.

On the north side of the facility a cluster of sleek executive jets rests not far from the looming control tower, tall and space-aged looking with its blue mirrored surface.

It's hard to believe this is a real airport. A moment ago I parked a stone’s throw from the terminal building, waltzed right up to the runway without showing a boarding pass, and ran no risk of being stripped down to my boxers and wanded by a federal agent. No wonder the wealthy fly this way.

It is ironic, however, that Santa Monica Airport has come to symbolize private aeronautic exclusivity. According to Bob Trimborn, the airport's manager, the modern airline industry was born here.

It all started with Douglas Aircraft which was headquartered here for much of the company’s life.

“By the late ‘30s Douglas Aircraft had perfected the DC-3 in terms of payload and fuel consumption,” Trimborn explains, thereby “creating the first practical mass transit by air.” Until then, flying was a wildly expensive lark.

Mr. Trimborn is tall, lean, mustachioed, in his mid-‘50s. He is a walking encyclopedia of aviation history, a keeper of the flame. For a flyboy like himself, who first jumped into the cockpit at age 14, one couldn’t dream of a better place to work.

“It was just a bare field originally, a naturally level area on a plateau surrounded by farmland.

“Around 1917,” Trimborn explains, “barnstormers and Hollywood stunt fliers started using it as a landing strip. After World War I, the US Army Air Corps trained pilots here in their Jennies’,” referring to the Curtis JN-4, the kind of flimsy bi-plane used to shoot King Kong off of the Empire State Building.

Trimborn’s office overlooks the runway and is crowded with aerobilia. There are black and white photos of old planes surrounded by open acreage, and others showing the airport as it is today, a small airport surrounded by urban sprawl. By some measure the little airport itself contributed to that sprawl.

“During World War II,” when the DC-3 and other aircraft were being built in massive quantities here, “there were about 30,000 people working day and night, seven days a week. This turned Santa Monica from a quiet little beach town into a blue collar city.”

The world’s first airplane to circumnavigate the globe, a Douglas product, launched from and landed here in 1924. Lear Jet was once based here. This is where Howard Hughes flew from before he built his own field in Culver City.

“Some time during the dot.com era,” Trimborn explains, “people started buying into proportional ownership of small business jets,” using the same arrangement with which people buy into vacation timeshares.

As if on cue, outside his office we hear a little jet streak in.

The flexibility of being able to call up a continent-spanning jet like you would a cab is worth the price to pressured executives and celebrities. The hassles of post-9/11 air travel have just added to the allure of the private jet.

I mention something about Santa Monica Airport “once being called Clover Field.”

Trimborn corrects me. “It’s actually still named that. A local World War I flyboy was killed in aerial combat over Europe. His mother petitioned to have this place named after him,” he explains. “His name was Grubby Clover.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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The views expressed in this column are those of Vince Basehart and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Lookout.
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