San Jose, CA
Opened 1939, named for William Reid and Robert Hill of Reid-Hill Hardware. WWII training site for SB2C Helldiver crews. In recent years the political center of California's leaded-aviation-fuel debate: Santa Clara County halted 100LL sales here in 2022, citing children's blood-lead studies; aviation groups challenged the action and the FAA intervened. The site offers a real-time look at where leaded-fuel general aviation may be headed.
The single biggest building most pilots will ever fly past. Hangar One sits on Moffett Federal Airfield at NASA Ames Research Center: 1,133 feet long, 308 feet wide, 198 feet tall — an arched dome enclosing 8 acres of interior space. It was built in 1933 to house the USS Macon, the U.S. Navy's helium-filled rigid airship — a flying aircraft carrier nearly 800 feet long that carried five Curtiss Sparrowhawk biplanes inside its hull. The Macon crashed off Big Sur in 1935 after just two years of service. Hangar One outlived it by 90 years and counting. The Navy decommissioned Moffett in 1994. NASA Ames took over and discovered the hangar's exterior panels were leaching PCBs into the bay. By 2003 the siding was being removed; for most of two decades the hangar stood as a naked steel skeleton, visible for miles. Google's Planetary Ventures leased the site in 2014 (60-year lease, roughly $1.16 billion in rent). Restoration finally completed December 2025 — recladding, new windows, EPA certification. The silhouette is back.
On the field at KSQL San Carlos. The deepest collection of vertical flight history anywhere — Stanley Hiller Jr. was the West Coast's answer to Sikorsky and built dozens of experimental helicopter designs from the 1940s through the 1980s. His XH-44 (1944) was the first successful coaxial-rotor helicopter to fly in the United States, designed by Hiller as a teenager and built in an Oakland garage; it first flew at UC Berkeley's Memorial Stadium on July 4, 1944. The collection includes the YH-32 Hornet (a ramjet-powered helicopter), several rotorcraft prototypes that exist nowhere else, and an Amelia Earhart Lockheed Vega (NR-7952). Excellent kid-friendly hands-on aviation museum.
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.
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.