Sky Is King in ‘Aviation Alley’

LANCASTER —  The teeming crowds of people who came to the High Desert from all over the western United States for a glimpse of a supersonic attack jet or a genuine test pilot disappeared with the close of last weekend’s Edwards Air Force Base air show.

But in the Antelope Valley, just south of the massive Edwards base, the air show never really ends. Residents of this area, called “Aviation Alley” by civic boosters, experience almost daily reminders of their locale’s identity, just as Angelenos need only stumble upon a movie shoot to rediscover theirs.

“This is hallowed ground for pilots,” said Dick Rutan, an experimental aviator and crew member on the Voyager, the history-making plane that circled the globe in 1986 without stopping or refueling.

Rutan and 19 others were honored in Lancaster last weekend at the Gathering of Eagles, an annual pilot-fest that plays more like a Kiwanis Club function.

Participants who paid $100 a plate donned sport coats or dresses--”That’s black-tie around here,” one attendee observed--to eat a mass-produced dinner and hear anecdotes delivered in front of an American flag that covered the back wall. This year, quick-tongued auctioneers also took part, as did Miss Lancaster--19-year-old Sara Chapin, wearing a silver crown.

It seemed strictly a small-town scene, until you looked around and realized that among the neckties and gowns were some of the world’s most famous fliers. Some had been to outer space. All had experienced speeds and views the rest of us will never know.

But these folks are often spotted around town, doing mortal things like grocery shopping and reaching Mach .01 in the family minivan.

The tightknit rapport between aviators and the community revealed itself this week in the stunned response to a midair collision at Edwards involving an F-16 Fighting Falcon and a T-38 Talon jet that killed two airmen. Restaurant customers exchanged sorrowful words with cashiers. Many flags were lowered to half-staff.

Lives here are altered by the paths of planes. Consider the stories of state Sen. William J. “Pete” Knight and 14-year-old Katrina Mumaw of Lancaster.

Knight is widely known as the “fastest man alive” for his 1967 flight in an X-15 jet that set a world speed record of Mach 6.76 (4,534 mph). Renown from that record, which still stands, helped propel him into politics. He won election to the state Assembly and Senate, using campaign literature adorned with images of jets in flight.

During the Gathering of Eagles, Katrina recalled being smitten by flying at age 8 when she and her family took a detour on the way home from apple picking in Mojave. They stopped by an airstrip where Rutan was performing test flights. She grabbed at a chance to quiz him about the skies.

“Here was this famous pilot,” she recalled, “telling me how planes work over the runway fence. It just seemed like what I wanted to do.”

Three years later, she flew a Russian MIG-29 over Moscow, becoming the first child pilot to break the sound barrier.

Growing up in another area, Katrina might have played soccer or taken ballet. As a child of Aviation Alley, her extracurricular activity created a sonic boom.

Asked to explain why the area is so attractive to aviators, residents speak of the High Desert’s natural surroundings--the vast, flat expanses where breezes chase clouds away.

“We enjoy less than five [bad] flight days a year,” said Lancaster Mayor Frank Roberts, himself an avid amateur pilot. “We’re a natural for flying. We don’t have any of the fog or the smog that other places do.”

Col. Joseph F. Cotton, a veteran Edwards test pilot and former Antelope Valley resident, returned home earlier this month as one of five inductees into Lancaster’s Aerospace Walk of Honor. He remembered driving around the area as a young man in his 1953 Ford.

“Traveling across the desert is an expression of freedom,” he said. “Driving for miles with nothing around never gives you the feeling of being hemmed in.”

If freedom comes at 60 mph, imagine the feeling at many times the speed of sound.