Buchanan Field

Rising alone out of the flat east of San Francisco Bay, Mount Diablo punches far above its 3,849 feet because nothing around it competes — on a clear day the summit sees over 100 miles, reportedly across 40,000 square miles, one of the largest viewsheds of any peak on Earth. That visibility made it a survey datum: in 1851 the summit was chosen as the Initial Point of the Mount Diablo Meridian, and to this day nearly every property line in northern California and all of Nevada is measured from this one mountaintop. The CCC-built summit building holds the survey marker and a small museum. The aviation hook: the summit beacon, built in 1928 to guide airmail and commercial pilots and visible for 100 miles, was first lit by Charles Lindbergh — and is still lit once a year, every December 7th, for Pearl Harbor Day.

Pier 3 at the former Naval Air Station Alameda, across the bay from San Francisco. The actual USS Hornet (CV-12) — the Essex-class aircraft carrier that served as the Prime Recovery Ship for both Apollo 11 (July 24, 1969) and Apollo 12 (Nov 24, 1969) — is now a museum ship and National Historic Landmark. The flight deck (888 feet long) and hangar deck are open for self-guided tours. Largest Apollo Program exhibit on the West Coast: a Mobile Quarantine Facility used by the Apollo 14 astronauts (the Apollo 11 MQF is at the Smithsonian), Apollo Command Module CSM-011 (used for the AS-202 uncrewed test flight), and helicopters and equipment from the recovery operations. Note: this is CV-12 the second Hornet — the Doolittle Raid carrier was CV-8, lost at Santa Cruz in 1942 — but a recently exchanged piece of B-25 wreckage from one of the Doolittle B-25s ("Whirling Dervish") is on display here. KOAK approach often crosses near the ship.

Hangar 7 at Oakland's North Field — Amelia Earhart's departure hangar for her 1937 round-the-world attempt. The museum preserves her original logbook, the Lockheed Electra blueprints, and a flyable Short Solent flying boat. Oakland was the first US airport to be illuminated for night flights (1927) and the start point of the 1927 Dole Air Race to Hawaii. Three of the eight Dole entrants disappeared en route — the Pineapple Derby was a tragedy that nonetheless proved Pacific aviation was possible.

You won't land on Alcatraz; you'll see it from the air, a 22-acre lump of sandstone sitting alone in the middle of San Francisco Bay about a mile off Fisherman's Wharf. It's been three things in three centuries. The Spanish named it for its pelicans in 1775; the Army built a coastal fort on it in the 1850s and turned that into a military prison after the Civil War; then came the federal penitentiary, 1934 to 1963, holding Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly, and Robert "Birdman" Stroud. They closed it because the salt air was eating the steel faster than crews could repair it. Of thirty-six men who tried to escape, three from a June 1962 attempt were never found; the government still lists them as missing, presumed drowned. From 1969 to 1971, Native American activists occupied the island for nineteen months, a protest that helped launch the modern Native rights movement.