San Jose, CA
Opened 1949. Renamed in 2001 for Norman Mineta — San Jose's longtime mayor and US congressman, who as Secretary of Transportation on September 11, 2001 ordered the first-ever grounding of all US civilian aircraft. Silicon Valley's airport.
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.
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.