Why you should experience Van Nuys Airport in Los Angeles, California.
Van Nuys Airport is a historic aviation complex where Van Nuys' aeronautical character meets parallel runways, corporate aircraft operations and an airfield shaped by pioneering flight, wartime training and Southern California aerospace.
Set along Sherman Way near Woodley Avenue and just steps from the eastern edge of the Sepulveda Basin, the 725-acre airfield occupies an expansive strip of level San Fernando Valley terrain framed by hangars, aviation businesses and low-rise development beneath uninterrupted approach paths. Two parallel runways form its physical spine, with the principal strip extending 8,000 feet past aprons crowded by private jets, helicopters and general-aviation aircraft. Watching operations brings successive departures, arrivals and ground movements into close view as aircraft transition between hangars, taxiways and the active pavement under tower control. Long hangar rows, maintenance facilities and the elevated control tower add a second physical dimension, making the infrastructure supporting flight nearly as prominent as the aircraft themselves. The result is an active airport whose scale and specialized infrastructure preserve nearly a century of aviation development within the urban fabric of the San Fernando Valley.
What you should know about Van Nuys Airport.
Van Nuys Airport is best known for developing from an 80-acre private airfield opened as Metropolitan Airport on December 17, 1928, exactly 25 years after the Wright brothers' first powered flight. A small group of citizens established the corporation behind the field amid trees and farmland, charging 50 cents for a landing and $35 per month to hangar a biplane. The young airport rapidly became a proving ground for record-setting aviators: Herbert Fahy established a 37-hour men's solo endurance mark there in 1929, Elinor Smith and Bobbi Trout achieved a 42-hour women's endurance mark the same year, and Florence “Pancho” Barnes reached 196 miles per hour in a women's speed record in 1930. Hollywood simultaneously adopted the field as a production location, culminating in its appearance in Casablanca during the 1940s. World War II changed its purpose completely after the federal government purchased Metropolitan Airport in 1942, acquired another 163 acres and converted the property into Van Nuys Army Airfield for West Coast defense and pilot training. Hundreds of pilots trained there in Lockheed P-38 Lightnings, and a 1944 partnership between the U.S. Navy and Lockheed established the Navy Lockheed Plant for aircraft modification. The wartime industrial operation also intersected unexpectedly with Hollywood history when photographer David Conover encountered Norma Jeane Dougherty working in aircraft production, beginning the modeling trajectory that preceded her career as Marilyn Monroe. Los Angeles purchased the 400-acre airport from the War Assets Administration for $1 in 1949 under an agreement maintaining a California Air National Guard base, renamed the property San Fernando Valley Airport and carried its military-industrial airfield into the postwar general-aviation era.
Postwar expansion turned the former Army facility into an extraordinary center of civilian aircraft movement and specialized aviation business. The California Air National Guard replaced propeller aircraft with F-86 Sabre jets during the 1950s and built permanent facilities as private aviation companies expanded across the property; their combined annual payroll reached $43 million by 1957, the year the airport received its present name. Completion of the Sherman Way underpass in 1959 allowed the principal runway to grow from 6,000 to 8,000 feet, removing a surface-street constraint as the airport reached 25th nationally in aircraft operations. Aerospace companies arrived with space-age projects during the following decade, prompting further land acquisition and construction of the control tower still associated with the airfield. Operations reached 562,079 in 1971, making Van Nuys the busiest general-aviation airport in the United States that year. Los Angeles added the FlyAway terminal in 1975 to provide nonstop ground transportation to LAX and reduce parking and freeway pressure at the city's principal passenger airport. The California Air National Guard's 146th Airlift Wing departed for the Channel Islands in 1990, ending four decades of Guard operations; Los Angeles Fire Department air operations and helicopter maintenance later occupied part of the former military property. More than 200 businesses now operate at the airport across aircraft storage, charter, sales, maintenance, avionics, flight instruction and specialized support, sustaining the dense aviation economy that evolved from the postwar field.
How to fold Van Nuys Airport into your trip.
Van Nuys Airport works as the anchor for a San Fernando Valley exploration connecting regional historical preservation, engineered water reuse and the reco of habitat from twentieth-century flood-control infrastructure.
Begin at Valley Relics Museum, founded by collector Tommy Gelinas around an archive assembled over decades to preserve the commercial and cultural history disappearing across the San Fernando Valley. The nonprofit now occupies airport hangars on Balboa Boulevard, placing vintage neon, automobiles, photographs, clothing, documents, signs and ephemera inside the same aviation landscape that shaped a substantial portion of the region's twentieth-century development. Its specialized holdings include the Palomino Collection, acquired in 2016 with 31 artifacts associated with North Hollywood's influential country-music venue, and a postcard archive containing 485 images divided across subjects including airports, agriculture, street scenes, entertainment, businesses and early Valley history. A separate menu archive preserves restaurants spanning decades of suburban growth, turning transient pieces of commercial life into an extensive physical account of communities transformed by redevelopment and changing consumer culture. Continue to The Japanese Garden, conceived by Los Angeles City Engineer Donald C. Tillman as a demonstration that highly treated wastewater could sustain a landscape demanding exceptional horticultural control. Koichi Kawana designed the 6.5-acre SuihoEn and organized it as three connected environments: a dry karesansui meditation garden, a Chisen wet-strolling garden and a tea garden surrounding a Shoin building with a four-and-a-half-tatami teahouse. Dedicated June 14, 1984, the garden uses reclaimed water from the adjoining treatment plant to supply its 2.75-acre lake, waterfalls and streams; Japanese artisans hand-carved its stone lanterns. Kawana based the principal composition on strolling gardens created for feudal lords during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, adapting that tradition to the climate, vegetation and contemporary infrastructure of the San Fernando Valley. Conclude at Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve, whose ecological landscape emerged from land acquired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers after destructive 1930s floods led to construction of Sepulveda Dam in 1941. A radically different habitat history began after the 1971 Sylmar earthquake damaged Lower Van Norman Dam and clay excavated from the basin for repairs left borrow pits that filled with water and attracted migratory birds and other wildlife. The Army Corps created a 48-acre riparian edge that year, and the Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve was formally established in 1979 before the 1981 basin master plan assigned additional terrain to wildlife and recreation. Sixty acres of habitat north of Burbank Boulevard followed in 1988, reclaimed water began entering the basin in 1992 and another 60 acres west of Haskell Creek were added in 1998. The progression moves from a museum preserving the Valley's disappearing commercial culture through Koichi Kawana's fusion of traditional landscape design and recycled water and culminates in habitat created from the physical consequences of flood control and earthquake repair, revealing the industrial, environmental and cultural forces surrounding Van Nuys Airport.
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