The fight over the nation’s busiest single-runway airport.
By Stephen Joiner
Air & Space Magazine
October 2014
On a hot afternoon in August 1945, the voice of Donald Douglas boomed over loudspeakers in the cavernous assembly buildings of the Douglas Aircraft Corporation at California’s Santa Monica Airport. All up and down the queues of C-47 Gooney Birds and A-26 Invaders, rivet guns and impact wrenches fell silent as Douglas informed the first shift that World War II was over. Japan had surrendered. “We all put down our tools and streamed out onto Ocean Park Boulevard, laughing and singing and hugging each other,” one employee recalled in a book on the manufacturer. Like many Douglas workers who lived in neighborhoods surrounding the airport, she hurried home and later celebrated through the night at the Santa Monica pier with most of the city. That was then. http://www.airspacemag.com/
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