San Francisco International

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.

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.

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.