Museum of Flying May Find New Digs

A plan to reopen a scaled-down Museum of Flying at a new Santa Monica Airport location appears to be, um, taking flight.

The museum shut its hangar doors in July after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks sent insurance premiums soaring, forcing museum officials to ground their fleet. Local airplane enthusiasts feared that the museum would move to another Southern California community.

Enter Supermarine, an aviation service provider that had subleased space to the museum. It is floating a plan for Volkswagen of America to relocate its North American Design Studios from Simi Valley to the museum’s old digs.

The plan calls for the museum to reopen at a hangar that Supermarine also controls, across a ramp from the museum’s former location.

Bob Trimborn, manager for Santa Monica Airport, said he is pleased with the plan.

“There are a lot of historic events that happened here,” he said. “The first aircraft to circumnavigate the Earth departed from this airport in the early 1920s.”

The Santa Monica City Council is scheduled to vote Dec. 17 whether to amend Supermarine’s lease with the city to allow a design studio. Volkswagen officials want to sublease roughly 44,000 square feet from Supermarine for about 12 years as a base for about 50 employees.

If the deal goes through, the museum would reopen in a 12,000-square-foot space -- slightly more than a quarter of the size of its previous location.

Daniel Ryan, vice president and executive director of the museum, said the smaller space will require reduced flight operations. Many aircraft, he added, will be loaned to other museums on a rotating basis.

Those museums will cover the planes’ insurance and maintenance while they are on loan.

“Our revenue streams wouldn’t support our old operations,” Ryan said. “We knew we needed to scale back.”

The new location includes a 6,800-square-foot hangar, 1,200 square feet of office space and a 4,000-square-foot ramp that will be used to display aircraft.

The museum opened in 1989 and housed about 35 fighter planes and artifacts, including a bell rung on the battleship Arizona when it was attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.