City’s aerospace past will no longer be on display
Santa Monica Airport’s Museum of Flying has crashed — burned by high insurance premiums and the city’s costly noise ordinance fines, officials said.
After more than 25 years in the community, museum officials announced they will shut their doors permanently on July 28 and relocate the operation to another regional airport.
Increased insurance costs have prohibited museum officials from flying its collection of World War II era fighter planes since Sept. 11 because their premiums have increased nearly 90 percent.
They believe by moving the museum to a more rural location, those premiums could be lowered enough to continue flying the planes. Though museum operators said a new location has not been formally chosen, some speculate a lease may be signed for space at Camarillo Airport.
369,“We are in conversation with a number of locations within reasonable driving distances from Santa Monica,” said Dan Ryan, the museum’s executive director. “Every location has its advantages and disadvantages, but there’s at least one location where we feel we could do much better than where we are at now.”
Originally founded as the Donald Douglas Museum and Library in 1974, the museum is now a non-profit corporation with an extensive collection of planes, models and exhibits, located in a hangar at the airport. The current location opened in April 1989 and has been host to nearly 200,000 youths from local area schools as part of its interactive educational tour program.
Before Sept. 11, the museum would fly its planes 10-15 hours a month. But now insurance companies are worried about Santa Monica Airport’s proximity to residential and commercial developments.
51B,“I couldn’t imagine if there was an accident or incident involving ours or anyone else’s aircraft here,” Ryan said. None of the other companies flying out of Santa Monica on a daily basis seem to be having difficulty.”
Airport manager Bob Trimborn said he has worked hard to keep the museum in its present location and is disappointed to see it go.
“It’s definitely not in the best interest of the airport that they’re closing,” Trimborn said. “That museum holds so many important artifacts from this airport’s past.”
Ryan also said museum officials are upset at the high fines charged by the city against violators of its noise ordinance. A first offender can receive a $2,000 fine, a second could receive a $5,000 fine and beyond that violators may be charged $10,000 per infraction.
“We have to power back the aircraft to land them (underneath the noise ordinance), and that’s not safe and its bad for the engine,” Ryan said. “And besides, I don’t even have $2,000 in our marketing budget, let alone enough to pay fines to the city.”
He added, “We have exhausted all options (with the city).”
But Trimborn said the museum’s planes rarely breached the noise ordinance.
“The noise ordinance hasn’t changed except for the fining element,” he said. “We’ve had very few violations from them over the years.”
During World War II, Donald Douglas built many of the military’s planes at its factories located at the Santa Monica Airport. The factories brought 44,000 workers into the city, changing Santa Monica from a sleepy bedroom community into a thriving city.
In addition, the Museum of Flying has held multiple commemorative events and recognized various groups of aviation and aerospace celebrities, including the greatest test pilots of the 20th century and the pioneering astronauts from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space missions.
The airport also houses numerous artifacts from Santa Monica’s aviation past, such as Donald Douglas’ drafting table and a plane built at the airport that was one of the first to fly around the world.
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Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 4, 2002. Read the original PDF.