Tustin Marine Corps Hangar History
Seventeen stories high, over 1,000 feet long, 300 feet wide and each with a floor area of over 5 acres under one roof. The Tustin hangars are two of the largest wood structures in the world. Who built them? And why? The answers are not hard to understand and they all lead back to one Sunday morning a long time ago.
Orange County, California was a much different place in 1941 than it is today. Some forty miles south of Los Angeles and with just over 130,000 people, it was farm country with endless orange groves and bean fields. But the few people who lived here at the time were focused on the same issue as Americans everywhere; the war in Europe and the Pacific. It was on everyone’s mind. It was the topic of every conversation.
With the images of Pearl Harbor still painfully fresh, the country was on high alert for an attack by Japan on the Pacific Coast or Germany on the Atlantic Coast. Defending the coast lines was a national priority and the war department decided on a well-tested technology which had been around since before World War I: Lighter than air (or LTA) air ships.
After World War II, the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) would become the primary operations and training facility for Marine Corps helicopter aviation on the Pacific Coast and it played a critical role in every military operation from 1942 to 1996 including Korea, Vietnam and Operation Desert Storm.
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