Northrop Aircraft is perhaps best known for its avant garde flying-wing aircraft. Indeed, many say that Jack Northrop's innovative designs were way ahead of their time. After a lengthy gestation, the opportunity for the flying wing to make military history was at hand in 1946. The first XB-35, a massive, four-engine flying wing intended to be America's next big bomber, took off from the diminutive Northrop Field, now also known as Hawthorne Municipal Airport. That first flight did not return to Hawthorne; instead, it landed at what is now Edwards Air Force Base.
Film footage of the initial flight of Northrop's XB-35 shows the aircraft departing Hawthorne to the east. As it clears the airport boundary, you see a smattering of trees and wide-open fields. The roar of the eight counterrotating propellers falls not on the ears of angry homeowners but a cluster of cows.
A lot has changed in 50 years. Landlocked amid Los Angeles' urban sprawl, Hawthorne today is typical of a small big-city airport. Its single runway is ringed by concrete and asphalt, Northrop/Grumman's massive facility immediately to the south, and the recently completed Century Freeway hard to the north. There's almost no open ground into which the airport could expand, even if the city wanted it to.
On top of that, the airport resides a stone's throw from Los Angeles International, meaning that the airspace immediately north makes up the LAX Class B, right down to the ground. The airport has a control tower and is served by a localizer approach. Hawthorne fulfills a significant role as a reliever for LAX. That's not to say you can expect to see a Boeing 747 taxiing by the east-end restaurant when the weather goes down at the big airport, but that many businesses that would otherwise need to fly airplanes into LAX can use Hawthorne instead. The benefits of Hawthorne to LAX's capacity cannot be understated. Imagine controllers having to accommodate regular light aircraft among an almost endless stream of heavyweight airlines.
Paul Nafziger, until recently a flight-test coordinator for Hughes Aircraft, used Hawthorne as a destination for a commute from his home near Tehachapi. His tariff for living in paradise was either a 45-minute flight or a three-hour drive. "Hawthorne was the ideal base for me," he says. "It was close enough to my offices at LAX to be convenient, yet kinder to a Mooney pilot than International would be."
And it's only Hawthorne's proximity to LAX that has made it a large target for bureaucrats and politicians. Several proposals have been floated in response to a space crunch at LAX, among them an idea to turn Hawthorne into a commuter airline port with light rail connections to the main terminal at LAX. Implicit in this sort of proposal is the displacement of general aviation.
Fortunately for GA, the Los Angeles Airport Commission struck down two of the four LAX-expansion proposals, among them the conversion of Hawthorne into a commuter port. One reason for dismissing this concept was a concern by the airlines that passengers would not tolerate the estimated 35 minutes that would have to be added to each flight to make the connection at LAX.
This change of heart is good news to Hawthorne airport residents and to Northrop's continuing presence on the field. Daily flights from Northrop's flight center take factory personnel to Palmdale and Edwards to help develop the myriad military contracts under the Northrop/Grumman umbrella.
Earlier this year, the airport came under yet another attack, this time from real estate developers who floated an idea to the city council to turn the 85-acre airport into a shopping mall. (Southern California residents will appreciate that the last thing the area needs is another shopping center.) For the moment, thanks in part to rapid response from AOPA and its Airport Support Network volunteer at Hawthorne, the movement appears to have slowed significantly. There is also the issue of federal airport improvement funds that the city must repay if the facility is not operated as a public airport.
Hawthorne's situation is not unique. All over California, a revitalized economy has created a boom in building and developers have taken notice of all the land that those pesky airports take up. Noise complaints continue to plague urban airports and the local governments are being forced to spend money on noise-monitoring equipment instead of on the airport infrastructure itself.
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