Lancaster, CA
Opened 1936 as Antelope Valley Airport, renamed for William J. Fox, USMC Reserve aviator who established Marine Corps aviation in the Antelope Valley. Sits in the heart of California's aerospace high-desert: Edwards AFB to the east, Plant 42 to the southeast (where every B-2 Spirit was assembled), and Mojave Air & Space Port (KMHV) to the northeast. The cleanest, driest flying weather in California — pilots from the LA basin come up to escape the marine layer and practice in genuinely empty desert sky.
Edwards Air Force Base, Rogers Dry Lake — the natural 44-square-mile lakebed where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the X-1 on October 14, 1947. Pancho Barnes ran the Happy Bottom Riding Club from 1947 to 1953 on adjacent land — pilots who broke Mach 1 earned a free steak. The club burned down in 1953 under suspicious circumstances during a land dispute with the Air Force. Today Pancho's memorial sits at the Edwards main gate. Mojave Air & Space Port (KMHV) is 30 miles west on the same lakebed system.
Walk the ramp at KMHV and you're standing where Voyager took off in 1986 to become the first aircraft to fly around the world non-stop, unrefueled (Burt Rutan's wife Jeana Yeager and brother Dick Rutan, 9 days, 3 minutes, 44 seconds). SpaceShipOne launched here in 2004 to win the Ansari X-Prize as the first private manned spacecraft. Steve Fossett took GlobalFlyer around the world solo non-stop in 2005. Today Stratolaunch — Paul Allen's twin-fuselage carrier with the largest wingspan ever flown (385 feet) — operates from this same ramp. The boneyard of stored airliners on the south side of the airport is among the largest in the country. The desert horizon makes the Earth feel like a spaceport.
Where Kelly Johnson's Lockheed Advanced Development Programs — the Skunk Works — designed the U-2 (1955), SR-71 Blackbird (1964), and F-117 Nighthawk (1981). The original Plant B-1 sat at Burbank Airport's northwest corner. The Skunk Works moved to Palmdale (Plant 42) in 1989 and the Burbank land was redeveloped — today an Empire Center shopping mall covers most of the historic plant. Pirep marks the site for what happened here, not what stands now: the airplanes that won the Cold War were drafted on these blocks.
Tucked under the Verdugo Hills at the east end of the San Fernando Valley, Burbank calls itself the Media Capital of the World — and earns it. Warner Bros. built its 62-acre lot here in 1926 (still 36 sound stages, including one with a two-million-gallon water tank); Walt Disney moved his studio to Buena Vista Street in 1939 on the success of Snow White; NBC's "beautiful downtown Burbank" became a national punchline on Laugh-In. The three sit clustered in the Media District along the LA River. There's an aviation thread too: the airport you fly into was the home of Lockheed's Skunk Works — the U-2 that found the missiles in Cuba was built feet from the runway, before the operation moved up to Palmdale. Comedy, cartoons, blockbusters, and spy planes, all in one valley town.