Hawthorne, CA
KHHR is Hawthorne Municipal / Jack Northrop Field, named for the founder of Northrop Aircraft (P-61 Black Widow, F-89 Scorpion, T-38, YB-35 flying wing). Eureka! opened here in 2013 as their LA flagship — the chain's HQ is upstairs. Gourmet burgers with farm-to-table ingredients (bone-marrow butter burger, Fresno fig burger), serious craft beer and small-batch whiskey program. Inside Jet Center LA FBO lobby with runway views. SpaceX is the neighbor.
Jack Northrop's first aircraft plant opened across the street in 1939; the field was named for him in 2008. The Northrop YB-49 Flying Wing flew from these runways. Today SpaceX's headquarters and Falcon 9 design center sit on the south boundary — Crew Dragons and Starlink satellites are designed in plain view of the GA ramp. KHHR is tucked directly beneath the LAX Class B shelf.
1 Rocket Road — where every Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Crew Dragon, and Starlink satellite is designed and built. Mission Control sits across the parking lot from the production floor. The full-scale Falcon 9 booster outside the front entrance is a real flown rocket. Public tours suspended; the lobby cafe is occasionally accessible. KHHR airport is across the street — pilots flying in can see the Dragon test stand from the GA ramp.
The field you're landing at carries one of the great American lives. Louis Zamperini — the "Torrance Tornado" — set a national high-school mile record here, ran the 5,000m at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (closing with a 56-second final lap that caught Hitler's eye), and roomed with Jesse Owens. Then came the war: a B-24 bombardier, he went down in the Pacific in 1943, survived 47 days adrift on a raft in shark waters, and endured two years of brutal Japanese POW camps — the story Laura Hillenbrand told in Unbroken. Torrance renamed its airport Zamperini Field in his honor on December 7, 1946. The Western Museum of Flight sits right on the field, and a David Flores mural of Zamperini is part of the town's murals. He carried the Olympic torch past the very prison where he'd been held.
At Long Beach (KLGB) you can't miss the Queen Mary: a 1,019-foot ocean liner welded permanently into the harbor. She was the fastest liner in the world from 1936 to 1952, held the Blue Riband for 14 years, and in WWII, painted gray as the Grey Ghost, carried 765,000 troops across the Atlantic, sometimes 16,000 at a time, zigzagging to outrun U-boats. Hitler put a bounty and a Knight's Cross on her; nobody collected. Her last crossing was 1967; Long Beach bought her, pulled the engines, and welded her to the harbor bottom as a hotel and museum. She's had a rocky financial run and has closed and reopened more than once, but as of spring 2026 she's open. Allegedly the most haunted spot in California, depending on which paranormal investigator you ask.
Originally HOLLYWOODLAND — built 1923 as a real-estate billboard for an Beachwood Canyon housing development. The "LAND" portion was removed in 1949 and the sign restored in 1978. Each letter is 45 feet tall. The sign sits at 1,578ft elevation on Mount Lee in the Hollywood Hills. The white letters are 45ft tall and read clearly from any aerial vantage with a southern exposure to the hill.