The End of an Era : Meadowlark Airport, “A Little Dream World,” Winds Down Operation

A pilot’s dream:

I’ m flying around up in beautiful, clear weather and the sun is shining on the ocean, and I can see for miles, but now it’s time to set it down somewhere, and I start looking for a place. And there, right near the ocean, I see this tiny little strip, with lots of small planes, really terrific ones, parked next to it. I don’t need clearance, either -- nobody on the radio telling me what to do. I just slide into the pattern and land, and I taxi off the runway onto the apron and park it. No problem. There’s this little cafe with picnic benches outside on the grass, and you can smell bacon cooking and coffee brewing, and all kinds of people are sitting out there, having a great time, talking about flying, and they’re almost all pilots like me, and they all know my name.

Time to wake up. Or rather, pack up. Because Meadowlark Airport is no dream. It’s been the seat-of-the-pants flier’s favorite hangout in Orange County since 1945, a home for the gypsy in the private pilot’s soul, a gravelly oasis where you can cruise for burgers in your Cessna.

But not for long. Soon the planes tied down on the apron will have disappeared forever, the cafe will be shut tight, the runway broken up, and many in the regular crowd for whom the little Huntington Beach airport was a second living room will probably be scattered to other airports throughout Southern California.

After years of wrangling over safety issues among the city, nearby residents and pilots, the owners of Meadowlark Airport--Art and Dick Nerio--soon will shut it down to make way to build condominiums and a shopping center.

Closing date for the airport had been set for Sept. 1. In fact, pilots keeping planes there have been ordered to move them by then.

Last week an association of pilots and homeowners, opposed to the traffic the shopping center would generate, filed suit against Huntington Beach to keep the airport open until construction begins on the new project. The Meadowlark Homeowners and Pilots Assn. has offered to settle the suit, and the city, which is involved because it approved the Nerios’ project, will consider the offer next week, said Art Folger, deputy city attorney.

But already the airport is slowly vanishing. Where more than 200 small planes were once parked, a barren field has begun to emerge. The tie-down areas are becoming overgrown with grass and weeds. Tufts of brush sprout from the taxiway and cracks in the single runway. Daily air traffic has decreased, the result of many aircraft owners moving their planes from Meadowlark to other airports or even selling them in the face of eviction.

But several planes and many owners still remain, as does a cadre of Meadowlark habitues who are seeing the airport out to the finish. For them, the airport’s closing means the end of truly freewheeling aviation, both in the air and on the ground: Meadowlark is the last privately owned airport in Orange County.

“We’re all family here,” said Ray Rice, who calls himself “an airport bum.”

“Here, it’s like stepping back into the ‘50s or the ‘60s to the way airports were then. Name me another airport around here where you don’t have to go through a locked gate and a big fence, where you can just walk out to the planes and look them over and kick the tires. Name me another airport where you can see people driving down the taxiway to chase a horse.”

Meadowlark has always been that sort of place, although the horse once stabled behind a row of hangars is now gone, one of the first airport tenants to leave.

Rice, however, still calls the airport home. He lives in a small motor home parked in a hangar and has his tiny 1954 Piper tri-pacer tied down on the apron. A former long-distance truck driver, who finances his flying by doing odd jobs, Rice can be found at nearly any time peering out from under an ever-present Greek fisherman’s hat and drinking coffee with friends at the Meadowlark Cafe, a few steps from his plane.

During the more than 10 years he has been a Meadowlark regular, Rice has attended dozens of parties and barbecues there, eaten hundreds of meals in the cafe, watched thousands of takeoffs and landings and photographed dozens of his friends and their aircraft. He has tacked up the photos inside the cafe on the wall opposite the big picture window looking out onto the apron. He can provide a full history for each photo.

Jack Silva appears in one of them. Silva is one of the more experienced pilots who frequent the airport and often is seen in the morning breakfasting with friends and talking flying. He holds the distinction of being one of the pilots who flew B-25 light bombers on location in Mexico for the film “Catch-22.” He is the owner of an appliance service business, a flight instructor and a Huntington Beach resident.

“I live here because of the airport,” he said. “I used to fly out of Fullerton, and I was a flight instructor there, but what attracted me (to Meadowlark) was when I flew over this area and found that it had the least amount of smog in it. There’s like a hole in the smog here.”

Silva called the airport “a common ground, a common place for pilots. Everybody’s big interest is flying. On weekends, the place is jammed with people coming out to watch the airplanes, a lot of non-fliers who get a kick out of seeing planes up close. But a lot of heavy-duty pilots hang out there, too. There’s a lot of talent.”

Classic biplanes, racing planes, aerobatic stunt planes and specialized aircraft of all sorts have been flown into Meadowlark by highly skilled pilots. One of the pilots of the Goodyear blimp, a Meadowlark veteran, once buzzed the runway in the blimp. Other regulars once flew Spitfire fighters and Lancaster bombers for the Royal Canadian Air Force, fighters and B-24 Liberator bombers for the U.S. 8th Air Force. Others have flown modern military jets and several are current or retired commercial airline pilots.

But most of the Meadowlark flying crowd consists of private pilots who like dropping through the hole in the smog for a quick burger and a chat.

“It’s almost a Midwestern type of place,” said Al Buckner, a roofing contractor from Buena Park who keeps his 1961 Piper Colt tied down at Fullerton Municipal Airport but frequently flies into Meadowlark. A pilot for 15 years, he formerly flew a sky-diving plane in Michigan.

“You meet pilots of World War II bombers, United Airlines pilots, and the waitresses know your name,” Buckner said. “It’s like a small town. And there seems to be no caste distinction. In Southern California, you need something like this for balance.”

Bruce Miller, a building contractor from Lakewood, said he has flown out of Meadowlark since 1968 when his friend, a dentist, brought him to the airport for a flight. Anticipating the airport’s closing, he moved his plane to John Wayne Airport two years ago.

“It’s the people, it’s the restaurant, it’s walking around the hangars,” Miller said in the cafe the other day, explaining Meadlowlark’s appeal. “At one time, my business card had two phone numbers on it: my business phone and the number of the phone booth here. A lot of business gets done on that phone. And there’s the social part. Half the flying out here is the social part. You’ll be sitting around talking and someone will say, ‘Let’s fly to Catalina.’ And you’ll say, ‘Let’s do it.’ And you’ll go right then.”

Which, for the uninitiated, requires confidence. The single runway at Meadowlark is only 2,100 feet long and about 35 feet wide. The final approach for landing must be steep and swift and takeoffs made decisively.

(By comparison, the runway at Fullerton Airport is 3,120 feet by 75 feet, and at John Wayne Airport one runway is 5,700 feet by 150 feet and another 2,887 feet by 75 feet.)

“You’ll go away on flying vacations for a while, and then you’ll come back here and look at that little runway,” said Miller, shaking his head. “You have a doubt in your mind for a second. A lot of guys look at that and don’t want any part of it. But if you can land here, you can land anywhere.”

And, said Chris Austin, president of Sunset Aviation, the resident flight school at Meadowlark, flying into the unlighted airport at night--when it is done at all--is tricky at best.

“There are two red lights on top of the power poles at the end of the runway,” he said. “You just go between those and line up with the yellow liquor store sign (past the other end of the runway on Warner Avenue). You don’t see the ground until you’re about 30 feet above it.”

Ben Rael, an instructor at Sunset Aviation, loves the short field, however.

“I’m basically on my way to Alaska to be a bush pilot,” he said, “and flying here is the best training I could get. Here I am in the middle of (the L.A. basin), and I’m getting bush time.”

Meadowlark has long stirred controversy between pilots and some residents, who have claimed that planes using it pose a safety risk for surrounding residential neighborhoods. The airstrip has averaged about an accident a year in the past decade, and in 1987 one person was killed and four were injured when a single-engine plane crashed after running out of gas.

On the ground, however, life at Meadowlark is never hair-raising. Sometimes the activity level would have to make a sharp increase to appear merely lazy. It is an atmosphere in which Art Nerio never pedals his huge, old orange bicycle any faster than he needs to collect the $3 landing fee from visitors.

It is an atmosphere in which Rice’s dog, Scraps, can sleep next to the cafe porch undisturbed by any engines droning on the apron nearby.

“Since I’ve been here, I’ve been amazed,” Rael said. “It’s the only airport I’ve ever seen that has so much character and is so laid back.”

The setting has always been attractive to would-be pilots who come to Meadowlark to earn their wings. But the school has acquired several eleventh-hour students who want to get their time in before the curtain comes down, Rael said.

“It’s like a legend here,” Rael said. “People are trying to get their license before it disappears.”

Charlie Ellison is one. A nearby resident and a recent graduate of San Diego State University, he flew his first solo on a recent morning, and Rael cut the back off Ellison’s T-shirt in the traditional gesture of initiation into the aviation fraternity.

“Everybody’s friendly here, and they all seem to have a good time,” said Ellison. “And people are always talking about flying. You can learn so much by just sitting around and listening.”

But class is about to be dismissed. Flying days at Meadowlark will end, and one day everyone will simply be gone.

Many regulars insist it won’t be an emotional parting, but Silva disagrees.

“It’s going to be a tremendous emotional loss to a lot of people,” he said. “There’ll be no place to hang out and see your friends.”

Several pilots still have not decided where they will move their planes.

“They’ll basically disperse all over,” Austin said. “We’ll never see each other again.”

Ed Nesselroad, the Newport Beach dentist who gave Miller his first Meadowlark plane ride, sold his plane, a Piper Cub, rather than face the bustle and restrictions of a larger, more impersonal airport.

“Here, it was kind of like escaping into a little dream world,” he said. “It’s the end of an era.”