BURBANK : ‘Way Out’ Airport Celebrates Birthday

Even still, Dave Simmons remembers vividly that day in 1930 when he and his father flew in a small plane from Clover Field in Santa Monica into the San Fernando Valley to attend dedication ceremonies for Burbank Airport.

From the sky, the pair saw the new airport and its small, one-story terminal surrounded for miles by farmland. On the ground, they watched in awe as what seemed like hundreds of Army Air Corps and Navy planes joined in a formation that looked like a huge black cloud, then buzzed overhead.

“I remember my father saying that it was a really nice facility, but he thought no one would ever use it because it was way out in the country,” said Simmons, former president of Lockheed Air Terminal. Simmons will be a featured speaker at a private reception Tuesday to commemorate the airport’s 65th anniversary.

Built by a subsidiary of United Airlines on a site chosen by the U.S. Department of Commerce, the airport was privately owned and operated until 1978, when it was bought by the cities of Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena under a voter-sanctioned joint-powers agreement.

Originally called United Air Terminal, the airport was bought in 1940 by Lockheed and by 1946 it was among the five busiest airports in the U.S., with about 1.2-million passengers per year. But that number dropped to just 175,000 the following year as the major airlines relocated to the newly opened Los Angeles International Airport. But over the years, the airport regained much of its former success by catering to economy air carriers.

Although many early airports were built on grass strips that had long been used for takeoffs and landings, Simmons said Burbank’s was built entirely from scratch, on land that had not been used for flights before.

“It was also one of the first million-dollar airports. It was astronomical for the construction costs to exceed $1 million in those days,” he said.

Simmons, who retired as president of Lockheed in 1984, will be joined by Tony LeVier, a former Lockheed test pilot, Bobbi Trout, a 1930s Women’s Air Race winner and others who will share their memories of the airport’s past at Tuesday’s event.

A Super Constellation Cargo-Transport-Overwater aircraft, built in Burbank by Lockheed in 1955 and used by the Air Force for cargo, passenger and humanitarian missions, will also be on display to the public for a $3 fee at Mercury Aviation, 4301 Empire Ave., from 3 to 5 p.m. Tuesday.