AIRLOOM : Blimp Hangars at Air Base Are Vast, Expensive Monuments to a Brief but Lofty Defense System

In a county marked increasingly by interchangeable suburbs, the two blimp hangars at the Tustin U.S. Marine Corps Helicopter Air Station look like something from another world. Officially known as the Lighter Than Air Facilities, they are remnants of a brief, bygone era--an Orange County that’s been lost.

“You could call them the pyramids of postwar suburban America,” said Ray Catalano, a UC Irvine professor of social ecology. “I tend to think of them as our own unintentional St. Louis arch. A lot of cities spend millions trying to build monuments to themselves. Ours are already here.”

These 47-year-old monuments show their age and are expensive to maintain, however. The Marines have commissioned an independent cost-analysis to begin this month that will consider the feasibility of tearing down one hangar.

Because the hangars are historic--listed on the National Register of Historic Places, in fact--any attempt to remove them would likely create an uproar. State and national preservation boards would have to approve of such a plan; public hearings would be required.

Such careful deliberation is appropriate, said Maj. Stan Gould, public information officer at the base. But he adds that maintenance costs for each hangar have risen to an average $200,000 annually. Repairs to both roofs will soon add $2 million. And a proposal to refurbish the offices in one hangar carries a $14-million price tag.

“That’s taxpayers’ money, and we feel we should use it wisely,” Gould said.

One thing is certain: These hangars are big. Each is roughly 1,000 feet long, 300 feet wide and 180 feet tall. Six Goodyear blimps could easy fit under the high, arching roofs. So would at least three copies of Disneyland’s Matterhorn. So would the Queen Mary, if the forward smokestack was removed.

The hangars saw their heyday in World War II, when they were home to 12 surveillance blimps that made up Squadron ZP-31 of Fleet Airship Wing 3. The 290-foot blimps were part of a network of blimp stations on both coasts.

Six blimps were assigned to each local hangar. In their 40-by-9-foot cabins wedged between the motors, the blimps--each more than 100 feet longer than the Goodyear blimp Columbia--carried six depth charges, one machine gun and a crew of nine. Every day, armed with depth charges, the blimps would chug above the Pacific, searching for Japanese submarines.

No submarines were sighted, no guns fired in combat, and the depth charges most frequently dropped were aimed at dummy submarines. Although a few blimps remained at the base until the early ‘50s, their era ended with the war.

Today, eight squadrons of Marine helicopters, including the CH-53A/D Sea Stallions and CH-46 Sea Knights, are parked in the hangars. The helicopters there are among the largest ever built, but inside the hangars they seem like bugs.

Catalan’s guess is that the hangars will outlast the Marines, but he said the corps raises a good point about cost. “Eventually we’ll have to ask ourselves exactly how much these buildings mean to us,” he said. The hangars meant a lot in 1942, when the Navy decided to build them on more than 600 acres of Irvine Co. bean fields on what was then called Santa Ana Naval Air Station. Hundreds of workers were brought to the site, and a special rail spur was extended off the Southern Pacific line. To save time, sections of the hangars were cut and shaped in Oregon and Washington, then shipped by train to Tustin. To save on metal, the ribs of the buildings were built entirely of wood. Each end of the ribs was framed with concrete pylons and sunk 150 feet into the bean field.

Orange County historian Jim Sleeper said the hangars went up quickly, though not particularly smoothly. One set of pylons listed and had to be replaced. Worse, a Santa Ana wind blew over a set of arches one night.

“I remember looking down at the framework that night and seeing it begin to sway,” said Arthur Guy, an early blimp pilot who is now a Municipal Court judge in Fullerton. “As it fell, I heard a tremendous cracking noise like thunder. The friction of the bolts against the wood caused it to glow slightly.”

The ribs were rebuilt, and as they rose, they formed the framework of the largest wood structure in the world, according to the Marines.

Henry Cord Meyer, an airship expert and the founding dean of UC Irvine’s history department, notes the buildings’ size: They were big enough to hold the 800-foot competitors of the soft-skinned blimps: the rigid airships, with internal steel skeletons, that had already lost their future several years earlier in 1937, when the Hindenburg airship crashed and burned.

“There was a small faction in the Navy that had yet to give up hope on the rigid airships,” Meyer said. “When the hangars were built, they hedged their bets by building them large enough to hold anything. In that sense, the (Santa Ana facilities) represent a technological blind alley.”

The naval station was decommissioned in 1947, and the hangars were briefly empty.

Capt. Bob Jones, a helicopter pilot assigned to U.S. Marine Corps Heavy Helicopter Squadron 361--the Flying Tigers--was standing at attention in Lighter Than Air Hangar One when an earthquake rolled through this spring.

“We were out there in formation and we all looked up,” he said. “You could see the rafters swaying and hear the whole thing creak. A couple of nails fell down onto the floor. I thought, ‘You know, this place is getting old.’ ”

Inside the buildings, helicopter crews must deal on a daily basis with birds dive-bombing unguarded lunches, and feral cats living in the walls. More seriously, the wiring is frayed and regularly cuts power, the plumbing is decaying, the wood is aging and the roofing is wearing away.

The hangars’ deteriorating state is the reason the Marines have commissioned Van Dyke & Barnes, a Santa Monica-based architecture and engineering firm, to consider whether taxpayers’ money might be more wisely spent, Gould said. The firm will file its a report in October.

Gould is careful describing the report. “First, it isn’t preordained that the consultants will recommend that one of the hangars come down,” he said. “Second, if anything happens, it won’t take place for years. Third, these buildings are historic monuments, and any action we might take would have to be cleared through a range of state and national organizations.”

But even with those qualifiers, the thought of what might happen to the hangars is sobering to men like Irvin Long, a Huntington Beach resident who helped build them. Long, 78, was too old to join the service when the war began. For him, building the hangars was a patriotic act and one of the high points of his life.

Every day in the summer of ‘42, he drove his dump truck to a quarry near Placentia, then down through the orchards toward the pair of buildings rising on the Irvine Ranch.

“You’d come out into those lima bean fields, and all of a sudden there they were,” Long said. “I’d never seen anything that big before.

“When we finally finished, I talked the foreman into letting me take a walk on the catwalk on top of one of the hangars. I got up there and looked in a circle. All you could see was trees and fields and mountains and the ocean.

“I remember thinking it was beautiful.”