Air Guard Planes Leave Use of Van Nuys Base in Air

Strung together nose to tail like a flying freight train, nine camouflage-green Air National Guard cargo planes roared away from Van Nuys Airport for good Saturday, leaving behind a base that is becoming the prize in a touchy land-use conflict.

The takeoff in a practice combat formation was the beginning of the end of a military presence at the airport that goes back to the days of Pearl Harbor.

With the Air National Guard base scheduled to be abandoned by the end of next year, the 62-acre site has attracted the attention of those who have rival plans for its future. A proposal that has gained some support calls for an aerospace museum and city park to be established there, primarily as a compromise between pro-aviation interests and anti-noise homeowners.

The C-130s of the 146th Tactical Airlift Wing lined up on the runway at noon before taking off from Van Nuys 20 seconds apart, following the lead plane flown by the wing commander, Col. Tandy Bozeman.

The parade of aircraft soared in formation northward over the Santa Susana Mountains, and headed for Edwards Air Force Base on what Air National Guard spokesmen said was their last mission from the Van Nuys base.

The mission was to practice dropping supplies to troops by parachute. After 18 sandbags were parachuted into the Mojave Desert east of the Air Force base--alongside the dry lake bed where the space shuttle lands--the formation flew westward to the Channel Islands Air National Guard Base, the wing’s new home on the Ventura County coast.

The 220-acre base is under construction alongside the Pacific Missile Test Center, a Navy base just south of Port Hueneme at Pt. Mugu, at a cost of $64 million.

Under the terms of its lease with the Los Angeles Department of Airports, which owns the airfield, the Air Guard will turn over to the city the 28-acre portion of the base east of the Bull Creek flood control channel at the end of this month.

The Air Guard has agreed to vacate the remaining 34 acres, on which most of the base is located, by the end of 1989.

The future use of the land has been the subject of speculation and planning by airport-based businesses and other commercial interests, neighboring homeowners’ groups and city officials.

Anti-noise homeowners’ groups, which have increasing political clout with Los Angeles City Council members, have for years been pressuring the Department of Airports to limit businesses there that might bring in more planes.

Pro-aviation interests have been organizing to resist them, pointing to requirements in federal law. The deed under which the federal government donated the airport, a World War II Air Corps base, to the city in 1947 requires that it “be used and maintained for public airport purposes.”

In 1985, the Board of Airport Commissioners, at the request of the City Council, established the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council to provide a forum for the two sides to work out their differences.

In the only motion ever to receive unanimous approval in the advisory council’s 3-year-history, the members agreed in April to ask the city to turn most of the Air Guard base into a city park and aerospace museum.

Pro-aviation members supported the proposal as a boost for aviation and as a public relations tool.

Clay Lacey, owner of a large aircraft charter company and president of the advisory council, said the park and museum “would do more than anything else to make the community feel a part of the airport.”