Blue Sky Metropolis - PBS Documentary July 14,2019

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KECT the local PBS affiliate is broadcasting a multi-part documentary based on the book.

Episode Guide and Trailer

“Wings: Aviation Takes Flight in Early Los Angeles”
Sun., July 14 at 8 p.m.

Episode 1 Description

“Wings” establishes Southern California as the undisputed aviation capital of the world, tracing its growth from the 1910 Los Angeles Air Meet to becoming an America’s “arsenal of democracy” during World War II, led by Jack Northrop, Glenn Martin and Donald Douglas.  Critics see an unhealthy alliance developing between the federal government and aircraft manufacturers.

“The Big Chill: The Cold War Fuels Business and Anxiety” –
Sun., July 21 at 8 p.m.

This episode traces how The Cold War and Pentagon dollars fund the explosive growth of modern Los Angeles and create the military-industrial-complex.  Entire suburbs such as Lakewood are built in record time to house defense industry workers, while also restricting non-white races from living there.  Fear of nuclear annihilation spawns the science-fiction genre for Hollywood. 

“A Space Odyssey: Southern California Spearheads Mankind’s Greatest Achievement” –
Sun., July 28 at 8 p.m.

The triumphant and tragic Space Race unfolds in the first-hand accounts of those who pioneered the technology and built the hardware that made possible mankind’s greatest achievement. Meantime, the military-industrial-complex expands unchecked.

“Back to the Future: A New Space Age Dawns in Southern California” –
Sun., Aug. 4 at 8 p.m.

The end of the Cold War brings massive layoffs, but tech billionaires choose Southern California to launch their space companies.  Though committed to the “democratization” of space, SpaceX and Virgin Orbit include the Pentagon as a major customer. 

KCET link

Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in Southern California (Western Histories) Hardcover – June 4, 2012

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Episodes of the above are being shown tonight.  All are viewable at this link:

KCET link

[Blackstar]

That started as a conference in 2007. I was one of the presenters. I wrote about that here:

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/938/1

Blue skies on the West Coast: a history of the aerospace industry in Southern California
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, August 20, 2007

California is many things. Riddle would be a poor word. Contradiction perhaps a little better. The state is an entertainment industry powerhouse, but an information technology engine as well, not to mention a major exporter of agricultural produce (ahead of Wisconsin in dairy products, for instance). If it was its own country, California would be in the top ten economies in the world. But what is the state’s reputation? What is it known for? A liberal populace, a Republican movie actor governor, social experimentation and trend-setting, a sizeable immigrant population (legal and illegal), high taxes and regulation, good beaches, pornography, economic opportunity, brush fires, Hollywood.

What about aerospace?

There was a time when the word “California” had an inherent connotation of the aerospace industry. At the height of the Cold War fifteen of the twenty-five largest aerospace companies in the United States were based in southern California. If you know the context, then traveling through that region is like a history of aviation and space in the United States.

Get on an airplane to California. Take the metal bird over the mountains and the smog of the Los Angeles basin, over the used car lots and the burger joints and the never-ending tan-hued sprawl of houses and businesses, over the vast shipping container fields and oil refineries of Long Beach, to the concrete bustle of LAX. Get in a car and drive and you don’t have to travel far to find evidence of southern California’s aerospace legacy. You can read it on the exit signs for the freeways, names that are synonymous with America’s aerospace heritage. Drive south on the 405 and you’ll pass El Segundo, home to Los Angeles Air Force Base and The Aerospace Corporation. You’ll pass Long Beach, Downey, and Huntington Beach, where companies used to build planes for the Air Force and DC-10s for the airlines, where North American built the Apollo command module. Turn east and you’ll reach March Air Reserve Base and its massive runway for B-52 Stratofortresses, and where the Air Force based its first bombardment wing and conducted the first tests of aerial refueling. Get on the 110 and head north to the 210 and you’ll reach the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, turn west to Burbank, once home to Lockheed’s famed Skunk Works and the place where the U-2 and the Blackbird were designed and built before being crated up and shipped out to the desert for testing. If you head to the southwest you’ll hit Santa Monica, which used to be a euphemism for Douglas Aircraft during the Second World War and later was the home of RAND, where the wizards of armageddon thought about Global Thermonuclear War and then sipped margaritas on the beach during their lunch break. Turn east and head into the Mojave desert and drive past the cactuses and the scrub and you’ll reach the Muroc dry lake and Edwards Air Force Base, home of those men Tom Wolfe called the best goddamned pilots in the world, where B-2 bombers drop smart bombs and C-17 Globemasters drop Humvees into great billowing clouds of dust from the lakebed floor and where massive Saturn F-1 engines used to roar and spew clouds of smoke from the edge of a cliff.

But Rockwell is gone. North American is gone. Douglas—excuse me, McDonnell Douglas—is gone. The rockets no longer roar at Edwards. Lockheed no longer builds planes at Burbank. Hughes Aerospace is gone. Well, not exactly gone. Some of these companies were rolled up into Boeing, others are no longer recognizable in their current form. Some moved substantial operations elsewhere. RAND is still there, but its influence waned after the 1950s. But General Atomics builds Predator drones north of San Diego. And there are new startups as well. SpaceX resides in El Segundo, a name that used to be intimately associated with military spaceflight. California no longer has the well-known reputation that it once had as the aeronautics powerhouse of the United States.

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Episodes of the above are being shown tonight.  All are viewable at this link:

KCET link

All episodes are now on the