The Fight For Flight at Santa Monica Airport

Takeoff

On a breezy October Sunday, Mike Machat, curator at the Museum of Flying in Santa Monica, is showing visitors around. Young children giggle with delight at the sight of a bright yellow Stolp-Adams-Starduster plane, suspended with wires from the ceiling. Across the street, planes take off on weekend joy rides from the Santa Monica Airport.

The Museum of Flying

The pleasant atmosphere at the museum, belies a battle coming to a head. Once a unifying point of pride for the city and its residents, the airport is now pulling Santa Monica apart. Machat, diplomatically, does not want to take one side or the other -- at least publicly. “I’ll come in from a historical side,” Machat, 72, said. “It’s a very controversial topic, because it is so polarizing.”

At the heart of the deepening row dividing the Westside community is a $3-billion land use debate. Some Santa Monica residents and City Council members see the airport as a dangerous and unnecessary vestige of a more bucolic past. Others argue that the airport is a historically significant landmark and a modern opportunity to cut arduous regional Los Angeles commutes down, providing access to affordable private flights. Companies like Blade have already rolled out affordable flight services in New York.

The airport is slated to close in nine years, on December 31, 2028, the result of an agreement made in 2017 between the city and the Federal Aviation Administration. At that point, City Council has the right to shut it down. The land is a developer’s dream, sandwiched between some of the United States’ most expensive zip codes. To the west is Santa Monica and Brentwood, to the south, Venice Beach and Marina Del Rey. What will happen to the land, is not yet clear.

Santa Monica City Council member, Kevin McKeown, a vocal critic of SMO, feels closing the airport is a great chance for new development in Santa Monica. “This would be the biggest opportunity for contiguous open space on the westside of Los Angeles for all time” he said. “There will never be another like it.”

But airports advocates are seeking to nullify the closure agreement, and doing all they can to keep the airport open indefinitely.

Holly Inaba, a pilot, flight instructor and program manager at USC’s Aviation & Security Program said retaining the airport is essential because no new airports are being built. With each closure, the burden on remaining small airports increases.

“There are only so many airports in existence,” she said. “Once one goes away, that’s it.”

However, McKeown believes the airport itself is the burden. “The airport has become an outdated industrial installation in the middle of a residential neighborhood,” he said. Converting it to a preserved open space, as he envisions, “would be the equivalent of Central Park in New York City.”

Cruising

Initially opened in 1919, Santa Monica Airport gained international recognition when four planes took off on March 17th 1924, embarking on the first ever, ‘round-the-world’ flight. Machat happily revistits that auspicious day, pointing out a painting on the museum wall. It depicts crowds gathered at Clover Field, a grassy 15 acre stretch of land on the southern side of the city. There to witness the inaugural flight. In the painting, men in flat caps stand under the plane’s wings and look up in awe. The planes were known as DWCs or Douglas World Cruisers, and were designed by Donald Wills Douglas Sr., an airplane developer, engineer and founder of the Douglas Aircraft Company, based in Santa Monica.

In 1919 when Douglas Aircraft began, Douglas Sr. took over an abandoned lot on the undeveloped southern side of Santa Monica to build airplanes. The company expanded rapidly, thanks to the United States’ investment in aircraft. The Douglas company built transport planes, fighter jets, missiles and rockets for the military, many of which were used throughout WWII.

Eventually, Clover Field became the Santa Monica Airport or SMO. The airport housed the Douglas Company and together they grew in size and stature, along with the rest of the city. The 44,000 employees hired by the Douglas Company needed housing, so small bungalows were built on the flat undeveloped, open land surrounding the airport. It became a working-class neighborhood, now known as Sunset Park.

In 1996,The Boeing Aerospace Company purchased The Douglas Aircraft Company. By then the Douglas plant had relocated to Long Beach and the once illustrious Santa Monica plant had been razed; but the airport has always remained in use.

Landing

In the midst of my tour, Machat beckoned me to sit in the cockpit of an old aircraft carrier, cleverly built into the wall. “Sit in the pilot’s seat,” he said. “I’ll take your picture.”

The airport is clearly close to Machat’s heart. He worked for the Douglas Company as an artist, drawing detailed renditions of the planes. His depictions are now dotted around the museum in frames. He was also commissioned to paint giant murals in vibrant colors on several of the museum's walls. The paintings are fantastical airplane tableaus.

Machat next to one of his renderings

An air travel enthusiast from an early age, Machat sent Douglas a drawing of a Douglas DC-8 when he was 12. “I said when I grow up I want to work for your company as an artist,” Machat recalled.

Airplanes, and the Santa Monica Airport are the unifying threads running through Machat’s life. His pride in the airport, its history, and his part in it is evident. It is as though Machat himself is part of the museum’s collection, able to recall specific dates in SMO’s history, explaining why certain propellers worked better than others.

Machat pulled out images of the airport and surrounding land that date back to 1919. The airport points like an arrow towards the ocean. In each consecutive photo, houses appear, closer and closer to the stiletto shaped landing strip. Instead of a landing strip, McKeown sees “an aircraft carrier afloat in a sea of homes.”

While McKeown sees opportunity in closing the park, others see trouble, particularly in the form of traffic. Debra Boiteux is an energetic waitress with a Southern lilt who works at the iconic Spitfire Grill, just down the street from the airport. “I believe this is going to be turned into a complex, similar to Playa Vista,” Boiteux said. “I don’t see any way they are going to handle the cars … traffic is my number one complaint.” Boiteux recently attended a city planning meeting where the airport development plans were high on the agenda. “People say they, [the City Council] have promised a park, I personally don’t believe that. I guess we will see when it happens, but I don’t believe that based on what I saw in the development proposals.”

McKeown said the city has promised to use the land primarily for parks. “Ballot measure LC, is a mandate from Santa Monica residents.” The measure was passed by the city in 2014 and prohibits any changes to the airport land without voter approval. “We can’t put anything on the land other than a park -- a big commercial development will not be allowed...No one wants it to become Century City,” McKeowan said.

It’s not just the potential land opportunity that is driving McKeown to push for the airport’s closure. He said he is also concerned about safety hazards. “No other airport in the country has homes built so close.” Plane crashes have occurred over the years, some of them fatal. Harrison Ford crashed his plane at a nearby golf course, after taking off from Santa Monica Airport.

Elizabeth, who only wanted her first name used, said she has lived a block from the airport for nearly three decades and that safety and air pollution are her big priorities. “I am totally happy to have the city close the airport,” she said. “The danger is a big concern.”

McKeown noted that planes still use leaded fuel, banned from car gasoline in 1995. He arranged for air quality tests to gauge levels of hydrocarbon, a toxic byproduct of fossil fuels. The testing reported the presence of 17 times more hydrocarbon when the airport was open, within a half mile, than when the airport was not operating.

Environmental concerns are at the top of many critics lists when it comes to closing Santa Monica Airport. A group called, C.R.A.A.P or Concerned Residents Against Air Pollution describe themselves as a grassroots advocacy group fighting for clean air, focusing on SMO.

Dave Hopkins, a spokesman for the Santa Monica Airport Association and a pilot, said the pollution from planes taking off and landing at the small airport does not compare with the choking fumes from thousands of cars driving through the city each day. “Yes, there are small amounts of lead in airplane fuel,” he said, “but it’s just the same in surrounding neighborhoods that have pollution from freeways.”

Hopkins noted that the many facilities operating close to the airport don’t see pollution as a problem. “There is a preschool that has been operating next to the airport for at least ten years. Playing fields have been there for at least ten years. Again these are permitted and knowingly licensed by the city of Santa Monica, so that doesn’t hold water -- the emissions argument.”

Hopkins is convinced that in the near future, aviation will become increasingly valued as an environmentally friendly alternative to owning a car. “The future is coming with electric airplanes” Hopkins said. “You will see a significant number of people take to the skies using these assets like Santa Monica airport” rather than commuting in cars. “They will be incredibly easy to fly, a lot easier than driving on the freeways.”

Hopkins does not believe the fight to save the airport is over. “The current City Council won’t be in office they won’t be in power [in 2028] and the City Council at that time may decide, like the rest of the US, that their airport is very valuable.”

Regardless of the airport’s fate, the Museum of Flying will remain. “If the airport closes” said Machat, “we will be the only place here that would show what this used to be.”

As the Sunday sun begins to set, three small planes take off in quick succession, their engines coming to a crescendo as the wheels lift off the ground. There’s time for one last trip before the day is done.