Regarding the June 14 cover story, “The height of flight,” while the Santa Maria airbase was originally built to train B-25 pilots, that plan was scrubbed after construction when the runways proved not strong enough to hold the weight of the twin-engine bomber. Instead, P-38 and P-51 pilots were trained there. Late in the war, America’s first jet fighter, the P-59, briefly flew from there before they decided to go back to the drawing board. After the war, pilots for its replacement, the P-80, America’s first operational jet fighter, were trained there, including during the Korean conflict.
One of the P-38 instructors was Rodger Ward who, after the war, went back to car racing, ultimately winning the Indianapolis 500 twice. The unused south runway, now holding the air tanker base, was the second Santa Maria drag strip in the 1960s and ‘70s.
This article appears in Jun 21-28, 2012.
