The program for our inaugural on-line member meeting will provide an historical survey of the airports in the Sacramento region and will be presented by chapter member and former president, Scott Thompson.

Beginning with the first airport in the area, Mather Field, established in the war year of 1918, we will progress through the subsequent decades and take a whirlwind look at how aviation developed in this century of aviation.
Just as Sacramento was central in the first transcontinental railroad of the 1860s, so too was it in the establishment of the first transcontinental airway of the 1920s.

And twenty years later, in the last years of the 1940s, the Sacramento region exploded with new airports. Most of those airports did not survive long as they gave way to a spreading suburbia, but join us on Wednesday night, April 15, at 6:30 pm as we explore some of these historic airports. Scott will work from a PowerPoint presentation so, for viewing pleasure, the bigger your viewing screen the better.

About our speaker

Scott Thompson has long held an interest in aviation history that has led him to compile a number of books and articles, primarily focused on World War II American aircraft. The development of the air navigation system through the decades has also piqued his interest, something that slots well into his day job where he performs airborne inspections of modern air navigation aids as part of the FAA Flight Inspection group. In Scott’s words, “To support this passion, he has several file cabinets full of obscure, arcane, and mostly useless bits of information about old airplanes as well as a large historical aviation photo collection.” 🙂

For example, Scott provides this photo of classic 1940’s marketing on the occasion of the opening of Dunbar Field in 1946:

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