Airport’s Future Tied to Its Past : History: Plans for a new terminal require demolition of a 63-year-old hangar some want used as a museum.

The future and past of Burbank Airport are on a collision course.

Plans to build an ultramodern terminal require the demolition of a 63-year-old hangar that aviation buffs want to convert into a museum to preserve memorabilia of the region’s role in aviation history.

The cement-gray building on the southeast edge of the airport has retained the same appearance today as it did in the days it sheltered the planes of pioneer aviators, such as Howard Hughes and Amelia Earhart.

But airport officials say the building must be razed within two years to make room for a taxiway to be used for a $200-million, 670,000-square-foot terminal to be built over 17 years.

“It’s simply in a bad location,” airport engineer Dan Feger said.

When the airport opened in 1930, the building was one of only three hangars on the airfield. The other two have since been moved. The airport’s current terminal, which will also be torn down, is the only other original building at the airport.

“That is what is magic about that building--it’s the real thing,” said Ron Dickson, a member of the Burbank Aviation Museum, the group that hopes to save the building.

Dickson said his group has mailed requests for funding to large aviation firms to help establish the museum and save the building, perhaps by moving it to another site. But he said the group has yet to receive any major commitments.

No studies have been done to determine the cost of moving the building, but Dickson said he would prefer to see the building stay where it is.

“Were it to be moved or remodeled, that kinda takes the shine off it for me,” he said.

The hangar is situated near the east end of the airport’s east-west runway. When the new terminal is built, that area is to be used for an airplane taxiway linking the runway to the concourse area.

The structure--often referred to as the “Hughes Hangar” or the “Earhart Hangar”--is now leased to Aircraft Service International Inc., which provides fueling services for the airlines at the airport.

Airport officials support the concept of an aviation museum at the airport, but they say they cannot promise any funding or land for the endeavor. Officials say their primary goal now is the completion of the new terminal, but that perhaps they could help Burbank Aviation Museum eventually.

“We hope they keep the flame going so that maybe we can add fuel to it in the future,” said Robert W. Garcin, president of the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority.

But the “Hughes Hangar” is not the only building of historical interest that must be leveled for the new terminal. The wrecking ball will also make rubble of Lockheed Corp.’s so-called “Skunk Works” buildings, where some of the nation’s most advanced military aircraft were built, including the F-117A stealth fighter.

Much of the aircraft design and testing work done in those buildings has been relocated to Lockheed’s facilities in Palmdale.

But for pilots and aviation history buffs, the old Hughes Hangar represents the glory days of aviation, when pilots still wore leather helmets and scarfs and the runways were surrounded by open farmland.

Like an old theater where legendary entertainers once performed, the gray hangar will forever be linked--at least by aviation buffs--to pioneer pilots such as Earhart, Hughes and Roscoe Turner, who were among the many aviators who tinkered on their planes in the hangar’s shelter.

Perhaps the most noted use of the hangar was when billionaire Howard Hughes prepared his twin-engine Lockheed Model 14 in the building before takeoff for his grueling round-the-world flight in 1938.

Howard Werner, who was at the airport when it opened 63 years ago, said he worked on Hughes’ plane in the hangar for three or four months after he got off work at Lockheed.

He said the hangar would be ideal for an aviation museum because over the years “it’s been used for all kinds of things.”

Hughes and his four-man crew began their 14,824-mile flight on July 10, 1938, at Floyd Bennett Field in New York. They flew at an average speed of 206.7 m.p.h. and at an average altitude of 12,000 feet using oxygen most of the way in the record time of three days, 19 hours and nine minutes.