New tenant will allow flying museum to stay
Plans for the Museum of Flying to take off for another regional airport have been grounded.
A deal was approved last week by the city’s Airport Commission that may allow the private owners of the museum to lease its space to a high-tech Volkswagen laboratory and move the exhibits to a smaller hanger at the Santa Monica Airport.
The museum closed its doors in July. Officials said it had become too expensive to operate because of substantial increases in aviation insurance and lower attendance numbers.
Museum officials also said they were having difficulty flying their antique aircraft in and out of Santa Monica Airport because of a restrictive noise ordinance that punishes violators with fines in the thousands of dollars.
The deal would allow the museum’s owner, Supermarine, to make more money from the hanger while also making sure the city’s aviation history wouldn’t be carted off and put on display at a far away municipal airport.
Under the terms of the agreement, which will likely appear before the city council in January, the museum would move into a nearby 12,000-square-foot hanger. The original museum was housed in an elaborately displayed 40,000-square-foot space.
“Here we get to retain a museum to display history of the airport, and the new design studio will be very low impact,” said airport manager Bob Trimborn. “It’s as good as we could get considering the circumstances.”
Museum officials were unavailable for comment.
Though the new museum will be less than half the size of the original, Trimborn said the new space will have an outdoor area where airplanes, which can be flown in from an outside location, can be displayed.
The result will be rotating exhibits that will likely act as a constant draw for visitors and help the museum keep its insurance premiums low, officials said.
“Airplanes on display will fly in, park and then leave,” Trimborn said. “It will rotate, and it won’t be as active as it once was.”
But Trimborn said the outdoor display will allow visitors a better view of what is happening at the airport.
“It has some better parking access, and there’s more of an opportunity for people to watch the activity than before,” he said. “It will still provide an excellent facility for the display of airport artifacts.”
The proposed 12-year lease with Volkswagen would allow the automaker to station about 50 employees at the space, which would be used as a laboratory for developing prototype vehicles.
Currently, Volkswagen’s North American Design Studio is based in Simi Valley, but the company wants to be closer to the Los Angeles metropolitan area and have a larger working space.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 30, 2002. Read the original PDF.