ORANGE COUNTY VOICES : Floating a New Plan for Glorious Old Hangars

There was always something unearthly about them, especially at night when they seemed to squat on the billiard-table earth like a pair of prehistoric behemoths, bathed in strange, dim light.

Years ago, when the name Orange County was not a misnomer, they heaved up out of the citrus groves, alone and immense and awesome, the two most massive buildings anyone had ever seen, made all the more huge by their isolation.

They had their own presence, their own rotund majesty. They even had their own weather.

When it got hot on the outside, the air would condense on the inside and a misty rain would fall from the bare ceiling, through the Byzantine web of heavy wooden supporting beams.

You could pack most of the Gothic cathedrals in France into the two of them and still have room for a couple of blimps, which was why they were there in the first place.

Aviation has always begged superlatives--highest, fastest, biggest, best--which is why anyone who loves flight has always been in awe of the pair of blimp hangars at the Marine Corps Air Station in Tustin. It seemed inconceivable that things so large--longer than three football fields and as tall as 18-story buildings--were built specifically to house things that flew.

But that was what they were for, back in 1942 when they were built: to keep Navy blimps out of the wind and the weather when they weren’t aloft over the ocean, searching for the Japanese submarines that never appeared. Each of the hangars could hold six of the big airships.

Because of wartime demand for steel, the gigantic arching roofs of the hangars were supported by a network of wooden beams, which rank the hangars--still--among the world’s largest unsupported timber structures.

Even without the blimps (the hangars shelter Marine Corps helicopters today) they surely are Orange County’s most overwhelming landmarks--never mind the Big A, never mind the puny-by-comparison South Coast and Newport Beach high-rises. Nowhere else is the surrounding landscape so thoroughly dominated by man-made structures.

The people who run the National Register of Historic Places thought so, too, back in 1978, and they put the Tustin blimp hangars on their list, waiving the customary rule that holds that a structure must be at least 50 years old to make it onto the register.

That means that when the Marine helicopter base eventually shuts down, one of the casualties of recent cutbacks in military spending, the hangars will remain. But as what?

The Marines say they don’t know. At this writing there has been no decision made. What, after all, do you do with a pair of blimp hangars, which surely are among the most specific of all dedicated-use items?

Anyone who can still wonder at the romance of flight in the age of space certainly would feel regret if they became, say, massive storage bins or repositories for old parts. Just as flying machines--whether blimps, helicopters or airplanes--were made for the air, the hangars were made to house them, not to fade into meaningless disuse.

There still are many civilians who continue to build experimental aircraft--fixed-wing aircraft such as the Voyager, which flew around the world without refueling, or innovative lighter-than-air ships for advertising, or other airborne machines that the huge aircraft companies would disdain as unprofitable.

How much easier and more satisfying would their work be in a true hangar, with seemingly limitless space, than in a garage or a warehouse? There is no mystery or romance or heritage in a backwater industrial park; but there would be under the great wooden canopies of the hangars. They are a part of aviation lore as surely as the Martin Flying Boat, the B-17 or the SR-71 Blackbird. Flight history was made in their cavernous expanses.

The hangars belong to aviation. They still reach toward the sky. They should continue to serve men and women who do the same.