Many Happy Landings : Van Nuys Airport Bustles With Pilots, Celebrities

Ronald and Nancy Reagan have flown from here. So did Howard Hughes and Gene Autry. Amelia Earhart even set a speed record during a race over its fields and runways.

In fact, thousands of recreational fliers, student pilots and airborne chauffeurs to the rich and famous continue to swoop into and out of Van Nuys Airport each day--enough to make it the nation’s busiest general aviation airfield, with half a million takeoffs and landings annually.

It’s a title the facility has held for more than a decade, officials say. And there’s no sign it will be relinquished any time soon--not as long as the queue of planes waiting to land is so long that air traffic controllers, like harried servers in an ice cream store, literally tell pilots at times to take a number and wait.

“We’ve got an aluminum overcast tonight,” one controller murmured on a recent evening, scanning the skies for the blinking lights that matched the white blips on the radar screen.

Melissa McPherson, a veteran air traffic controller, remembers the day she had more than a dozen pilots awaiting her clearance to touch down.

“I think I had gotten up to 18 planes in order, and then heard one of the pilots say the line of aircraft scheduled to land here in Van Nuys was stretched back over the water at Santa Monica,” McPherson said.

The often hectic pace of work for McPherson and her colleagues can take its toll, but the stress of their jobs is tempered by the easygoing attitudes of the pilots, who can afford to be more flexible without the time demands constraining commercial airlines.

“It’s a lot different here than at a major air carrier airport such as LAX where everyone is so serious,” McPherson said. “Here, pilots will work with you. I can tell a pilot to slow down a bit, and he’ll do it.”

The airfield has been in service since a coterie of businessmen incorporated in 1928 to build a strip that first took the name Metropolitan Airport.

It served as an Army airfield during World War II, then as the San Fernando Valley Airport before officially becoming Van Nuys Airport in 1957.

Throughout its history, celebrities from movie stars to Presidents have flocked to the airport, hopping onto chartered planes with plush interiors, gourmet meals, full bars, even beds. Indeed, the airport, once the stomping ground of director Cecil B. DeMille, has earned its own place in the annals of cinema with close-ups and supporting roles.

In the 1940s, it was briefly what one writer has called “the most romantic runway in the world”--the backdrop for the poignant farewell from Humphrey Bogart to Ingrid Bergman at the end of “Casablanca.”

More recently, the airport was featured in the Clint Eastwood film “In the Line of Fire” and the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle “The Last Action Hero.” (Less memorable screen credits include “Stop or My Mom Will Shoot” and “Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare.”)