Long Beach, CA
Daugherty Field, opened 1923, named for Earl Daugherty who flew the first Los Angeles–Catalina airmail. The Douglas Aircraft plant on the south side built thousands of C-47 Skytrains and A-26 Invaders during WWII; Donald Douglas's engineers later designed the DC-7 and DC-8 here. Howard Hughes assembled the H-4 Hercules (Spruce Goose) in adjacent Long Beach Harbor in 1947. Boeing closed the final 717 line on this field in 2006 — the last commercial aircraft assembled in California. Today an LAX reliever with one of SoCal's longest GA-accessible runways.
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.
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.
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.
On the west side of John Wayne Airport sits a tight, beautifully kept collection of WWII machinery that mostly still flies. Founded in 2009 by Major General William Lyon, the museum's aircraft are all in airworthy condition — the star is a B-17G Flying Fortress named "Fuddy Duddy" that appeared in the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora! and once carried General Eisenhower as a passenger. Alongside the airplanes (a B-25, an A-26, a C-47, a DC-3) is an unsettling piece of history: a 1939 Mercedes-Benz parade car originally delivered to Adolf Hitler. The docents are often WWII veterans themselves. On the right day, you might catch one of the warbirds taking off.