March Field Air Museum

The field came first and it never stopped. Frank Miller of the Mission Inn lobbied the War Department for it alongside Senator Hiram Johnson, the same hotelier who bought Mount Rubidoux and pulled the government's Indian school to Riverside. Alessandro Flying Training Field opened in February 1918 as one of thirty-two Air Service camps thrown up after the country entered the war, and on March 20 it was renamed for Second Lieutenant Peyton March Jr., son of the Army chief of staff, killed in a Jenny in Texas fifteen days after he was commissioned. The first flight off the field was that May.

It closed in 1923 and reopened in 1927, and after that it has been in the same business without a break: bombers between the wars, training for the Pacific, Strategic Air Command and its tankers through the Cold War, and since 1996 the Air Force Reserve. The 452d Air Mobility Wing flies KC-135s and C-17s off a runway of 13,300 feet, the longest in California.

The museum is the base's own attic. It opened in December 1979 inside the 1930 base theater, outgrew a commissary building, and moved out to the west side of the runway in 1993 so the public could reach it without going through a gate. Roughly a hundred and twenty aircraft sit there now, including an SR-71A, a B-17, a B-29, a B-52, one of the two YA-9A prototypes that lost to the A-10, and a Bell P-59 Airacomet, the first American jet fighter. The Distinguished Flying Cross National Memorial stands on the grounds.

The field still gets used for things nobody plans. On January 29, 2020, a charter out of Wuhan put a hundred and ninety-five Americans down here, and two days later the CDC ordered them held for fourteen days, the first federal quarantine issued in more than fifty years.

Which is the reason to come. You walk among aircraft that have been retired from a job the field is still doing, and the tankers going out over your head are the current answer to the same question.