AIRPORT HAS COME A LONG WAY FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

VAN NUYS - It started out as a dirt landing strip among farm fields. Then it was home to military fighters, bombers and transports during World War II and the Cold War.

Now celebrating its 75th year, Van Nuys Airport is America's busiest general-aviation airport, home to 800 aircraft from fire department helicopters to charter jets, a commercial center credited for 10,000 jobs and a $1.2 billion annual impact on the Southern California economy.

``It's become a business airport for the Los Angeles area,'' said Clay Lacy, a charter jet business owner who flew Air National Guard F-86 fighter jets out of Van Nuys in the 1950s and brought in the airport's first Learjet in 1964.

Van Nuys Airport started out as Los Angeles Metropolitan Airport, opened by a corporation established by a group of citizens in 1928 - the year after Charles Lindbergh's trans-Atlantic flight, when American interest in aviation was exploding.

The corporation went bankrupt during the Great Depression. The land went to Drusilla Daily in 1933 as payment for a debt. The airport was run by her son for a year or two, then her grandson.

Grandson Dean C. Daily was a movie cameraman and soundman. He tried to get somebody else to run it, but soon was operating it himself - pumping gas into planes and driving an REO jalopy and later an old Cadillac dragging a device for smoothing the dirt strip, said his son, Dean C. Daily II.

One of the ways the airport kept busy during tough times was with movie filming. Part of the World War I flying epic ``Hell's Angels'' was filmed there, as was one scene from the classic ``Casablanca.''

``That was pretty fortunate,'' Daily, 73, said of his father bringing in filming business. ``That was his contacts in the movie industry.''

(The story is often told that Van Nuys was the location for ``Casablanca's'' famous last scene, where Humphrey Bogart's character shoots a Nazi officer at the Casablanca airport. Actually, the filmmakers said that was shot in a studio, with a cardboard airplane and midgets portraying mechanics in the distance. The Van Nuys scene is the Nazi officer's arrival at the airport early in the film.)

Agriculture was part of the early airport, and not just because it was in the middle of farm fields.

``We grew banana squash between the runways,'' recalled Daily, whose family is still involved in operating the Van Nuys Airport Industrial Center. ``The thing with banana squash is it really doesn't need that much attention.''

The Dailys lost the airport with World War II. On the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, the Army Air Corps took over the field.

The Army paved the dirt strip, named it the Van Nuys Army Airfield and based B-25 bombers, P-38 fighters and other planes there. For an aircraft modification plant, Lockheed and the Navy built two big wooden hangars that still stand near Woodley Avenue.

In 1949, the city of Los Angeles bought the airfield for $1 and the promise to allow National Guard squadrons to use it. It was renamed the San Fernando Valley Airport.

A flight school opened after the city took over the field, then a flying service moved in, followed by a Beechcraft dealership, Lacy recalled.

The Air National Guard in the early 1950s was still flying World War II-era propeller-driven P-51 Mustang fighters out of Van Nuys, then switched to F-86 Sabre jet fighters.

In 1957, the same year the name changed to Van Nuys Airport, the runway was lengthened from 6,000 feet to 8,000 feet - crossing over Sherman Way - to make it safer for the jets.

But in 1960, the Air Guard unit gave up jet fighters for four-engine, propeller-driven C-97 transports.

``Our wing commander was perceptive enough to know the trouble we'd be getting into over noise,'' recalled Lacy, who had joined the unit in 1954. ``He volunteered us to be the first transport squadron in the National Guard. Half of the guys quit because they were diehard fighter pilots.''

By 1971, Van Nuys had become the busiest general aviation - non-airline - airport in the United States, with more than 562,000 landings and takeoffs that year. Many were from flight schools' planes, training ordinary folk to be pilots.

From the early 1980s onward, the airport was losing smaller planes and gaining more corporate jets, the focus of much controversy from airport neighbors angry about airplane noise.

The city enacted a partial curfew on certain types of jets in 1981, then four years later created a citizens advisory council.

In 1999, the city prohibited basing more of the older, noisier jets at Van Nuys, with exceptions, but allowing those already at the field to remain.

In February, the advisory council voted for altering the airport's proposed master plan - still under discussion after more than 10 years - to set aside acreage for small, propeller-driven planes, whose owners feel they are being forced out by rising costs.

Said Coby King, the advisory council president who pushed the proposal: ``I'm trying to preserve a place here a hobbyist can continue to have a central location in the San Fernando Valley and the studio executive can still be able to hop on a jet and get to New York in a few hours.''

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Van Nuys Airport began as Los Angeles Metropolitan Airport in 1928 - surrounded by acres of farmland - and was home to about 400 planes by World War II, when the Army took it over and renamed it Van Nuys Army Airfield.