How the Valley Took to the Skies : History: When LAX was frequented mostly by rabbits and farmers, airstrips in Burbank and Glendale helped usher in commercial aviation.

The Bush Administration has a proposal to allow cities to sell their airports to private parties. If Los Angeles decides to sell Los Angeles International Airport, many believe it would make LAX the first privately operated major airport in the nation.

But by the 1930s there were already five privatized airports in Greater Los Angeles handling commercial airline traffic. Two of the airports were in the San Fernando Valley: The first opened in Burbank, and the second soon after in Glendale.

Burbank Airport

In the mid-1920s, a survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Commerce recommended Burbank as an ideal site for an airport in the L.A. area. Bolstered by this, the Burbank Chamber of Commerce launched a campaign in 1929 to implement it. United Aircraft & Transportation Co., a forerunner of United Airlines, invested more than $1 million to acquire the land and construct a hangar and administration facilities.

It was on Nov. 16, 1929, that Pacific Air Transport, a predecessor of United Airlines, first used the Burbank airfield, although the airport was officially dedicated May 30, 1930. Later that year, the facility was named United Airport of Los Angeles and Burbank.

When United Airport opened, it was considered a model for the nation because it had five runways that led in different directions. The runways were 300 feet wide and 3,600 feet long, and the 234 acres of airport property provided more paved landing area than any other U.S. airport at that time.

In 1935, the airport’s name was changed to Union Air Terminal as more airlines began using it. Two years earlier, Western Air Express, the nation’s first regularly scheduled airline, had moved its operations there from Alhambra Airport. And in 1939, American Airlines moved in, making Union Air Terminal the center of major airline operations in Los Angeles.

In 1940, Lockheed Aircraft Corp., purchased the airport from United for $1.5 million, and changed the airfield’s name to Lockheed Air Terminal. Lockheed more than doubled the airport’s size to nearly 500 acres and extended the runways to 6,000 feet. By 1946, Burbank’s annual passenger count had reached 1.25 million, and it had became the major air terminal in the West for commercial airlines. That all began to change, however, when LAX grew rapidly in the late 1940s and 1950s.

The airport has had a number of name changes until acquiring its present jawbreaker--the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport. Today, the airport is owned by an airport authority shared by the three cities, and is operated under contract by Lockheed Air Terminal, a subsidiary of Lockheed Corp. In recent years, Burbank has enjoyed a comeback in traffic, spurred by extra flights scheduled by Southwest Airlines.

Glendale Airport

The next local privatized airport for handling airlines was Grand Central Air Terminal in Glendale. It was dedicated Feb. 22, 1929--according to “Madcaps, Millionaires and Mose” by John Underwood, an illustrated chronicle of the era published by Heritage Press. The airport was situated between the Los Angeles River and San Fernando Road on what had been orange groves and a field used as an airstrip for barnstormers.

Underwood wrote that the city of Glendale failed in the 1920s to sell bond issues to develop the airport further, so Capt. Charles C. Spicer led a group to establish “a proper municipal airport for Los Angeles.” The Spicer syndicate bought the 45-acre airport in Glendale and expanded it to 75 acres.

It’s interesting to note that the Burbank Chamber of Commerce and the Glendale chamber were both vying for their airports to become the official airport for Los Angeles. Capt. Spicer’s group later in 1929 sold out and Grand Central Air Terminal became a part of the newly formed Curtiss-Wright Flying Services.

The man who ran the airport was Major C.C. Moseley, a World War I combat pilot and commandant of the Air National Guard unit flying out of Griffith Park in the early 1920s. He had been in charge of Curtiss operations in the West since 1920 and was also head of operations for Western Air Express, a commercial airline that also carried mail. Moseley “became the dominant personality at Grand Central and would remain so for nearly four decades,” Underwood wrote.

Glendale picked up more traffic after the 1929 stock market crash forced a group of troubled airlines--Trans Air Transport (TAT), Maddux Airlines, Western Air Express and Pittsburgh Aviation Industries--to contribute equipment and manpower to form a new airline called Transcontinental & Western Air, Inc., a forerunner of TWA.

TWA later abandoned Alhambra Airport because it was too small and moved to Grand Central Air Terminal in Glendale, which became its Los Angeles terminus. (On March 31, 1931, a westbound TWA flight from Kansas City bound for Glendale Central crashed, killing all on board, including Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne.)

By the early 1930s, American Airways (now American Airlines) and Pan American Airways used Grand Central as a port of entry for overseas flights.

Moseley leased the Glendale Airport from Curtiss-Wright from 1934 until he bought it outright in 1944. Under Moseley’s aegis were the airport, a flying school, an aeronautical engineering school and an aircraft maintenance shop. During World War II, the Glendale flying school trained and graduated more than 4,000 flying cadets, according to Capt. Frank Argall, a former pilot who was in charge of four ground schools run by Moseley.

In World War II, to accommodate Lockheed’s P-38 Lightning fighters, Grand Central’s runways were extended from 1,200 feet in length to 5,000 feet by closing off Sonora Avenue and paving a narrow strip to Western Avenue. The P-38s formed the nucleus for air protection of Los Angeles during wartime.

In 1947, the runway extension was closed by municipal decree, and the loss of the 1,200 feet made Grand Central Airport--so called since 1944--a class 11 facility.

In the early 1960s, the airport was shut down. Though the runways are no longer there, the main terminal building still stands and it and other structures have become an industrial park.

Van Nuys Airport

Another early airport was in Van Nuys. A small group of businessmen incorporated in 1928 to build an airport in the rural Valley and the operation opened that year under the name Metropolitan Airport.

During World War II, the Army took over Metropolitan Airport, enlarged it and renamed it the Van Nuys Army Air Field. At the end of the war, the city of Los Angeles bought the airport from the War Assets Administration for $1. In 1953, it officially became Van Nuys Airport, and in the same year the runway was extended from 6,000 feet in length to 8,000 feet as the Sherman Way underpass was completed.

Although Van Nuys Airport never handled commercial airline flights, it is still going strong as the nation’s busiest general aviation airport, with about 850 aircraft based along its two parallel runways.

LAX

The dominant airport in Southern California is now Los Angeles International Airport, but it had a sleepy beginning. LAX’s predecessor has been city owned and operated since 1928. That year, the National Air Races were held at the airport--which in the 1920s was called Mines Field.

Later it was called Los Angeles Municipal Airport. But whatever its name, it was not fit for commercial airline traffic until early 1947. The passenger terminals, which were not finished in time for the first flights, were to be housed in temporary two-story wooden frame buildings on the north side of the field, east of Sepulveda Boulevard.

That year, the five major airlines serving Los Angeles--Western, United, American, Pan American and TWA--began moving from Burbank to Los Angeles Airport, its name since July 9, 1941.

Why the move? Politics had much to do with it. Certainly pilots were reluctant to move to L.A. Airport because of its history of being socked in by fog in winter months, and because the nearest Coast Guard station was in San Pedro.

But passengers arriving from the East were enthralled by L.A. Airport’s pastoral setting. At the west end of the runway was a truck farm. Jack rabbits lived along the runways and stood at attention in the weeds watching the planes take off and land. At the east end of the runway was a railway spur line for freight trains, which airliners had to clear in landing and takeoff.

In early 1947, however, L.A. Airport was closed by fog so often that planes regularly had to land in Burbank. Passenger complaints about uncompleted facilities in L.A. and political and public pressure from San Fernando Valley communities added to the unhappiness. “They’re coming back to Burbank--the airlines which went into fog-bound Los Angeles Municipal Airport last December and inconvenienced 2 million people,” crowed the lead of a front-page story in the Burbank Review on March 15, 1947.

Fog persisted at the airport during the late 1940s, causing pilots to be concerned about safety, annoyance of passengers because of delayed and diverted flights, economic unhappiness of airline executives and embarrassment of airport and city officials.

Of course, metaphorically speaking, the fog eventually lifted, and the major carriers gradually shifted to L.A. Airport.

Rockey Spicer was news bureau manager in L.A. for Western Air Lines in 1946-50.