FLIGHT HISTORY MADE HERE; AIRCRAFT PLANTS BUILT MACHINES TO WIN WORLD WAR II, MOON RACE TOO.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

When America went to war in the air against the Nazis and Imperial Japan, the San Fernando Valley supplied the machines.

Tens of thousands of men and women went to work in massive plants churning out P-38 fighters, B-17 bombers, and PV-1 and PV-2 submarine hunters.

Then the rocky foothills west of the Valley became a test range for Cold War missiles engines, shaking the tract homes springing up in the West Valley and providing jobs to thousands of other workers.

``It was really hard work, but it was fun,'' said a real-life Rosie the Riveter, Alma Hungerford, who was an Antelope Valley rancher's daughter a couple of years out of high school when she went to work for Lockheed's Vega subsidiary in Burbank. ``That was a different time of life.''

The Valley's aircraft industry bloomed with Lockheed, which had arrived in 1928 with a move from Hollywood to Burbank. Lockheed had made a name for itself with sleek, all-wood airplanes that set records in the late 1920s in the hands of famous aviators like Charles Lindbergh, Wiley Post and Amelia Earhart.

Sent into receivership by the Great Depression, then purchased and revived by a partnership headed by an aviation enthusiast and investment broker, Lockheed put out new, smaller airliners, the Electra and Super Electra, then pushed its employment to 17,000 in 1940 with a contract to build Hudson patrol bombers for Great Britain.

By 1943, Lockheed and its Vega subsidiary employed about 93,000 workers - that's more people than today live in Burbank - and was churning out a good chunk of America's arsenal: P-38 fighters, PV-1 Neptune patrol bombers, even B-17 bombers for Boeing.

Its Burbank buildings covered 7.7 million square feet, camouflaged - for fear of surprise Japanese air attacks - with chicken wire and canvas decorated with fake trees, houses and fence posts.

Lockheed created the P-80, America's first operational jet fighter. Though too late to get into World War II, the P-80 won the first jet-to-jet dogfight over Korea.

The P-80 was notable as the first product of what became the most famous aircraft design bureau in the world - Lockheed's Skunk Works. The small, secretive design bureau got its nickname from a secret, ill-smelling backwoods distillery called the Skonk Works in cartoonist Al Capp's ``Lil Abner'' comic strip.

Retired Skunk Works President Ben Rich said the name was inspired by the stench from a plastic factory next door to the circus tent in which the P-80 designers were working. One engineer showed up for work wearing a gas mask. Then a designer answered a phone ``Skonk Works.''

Through the Cold War, the Skunk Works went on to create America's most secret and technologically advanced airplanes: the U-2 spy plane, the F-104 interceptor, the triple-supersonic SR-71 Blackbird and the F-117 stealth fighter.

``The Skunk Works . . . for decades immersed itself in the blackest of `black' world projects,'' aviation writer Jay Miller wrote in his 1993 history of the organization.

The Cold War also meant rockets, to power nuclear-tipped missiles and to propel astronauts into space.

In 1947, North American Aviation - creator during World War II of such famous warplanes as the P-51 Mustang - was looking for someplace remote to test the engines for a winged intercontinental missile, the Navaho.

It picked a rocky and hilly section of the Santa Susana Mountains and sent a test crew of four engineers and 13 mechanics. Within 10 years, the test site was the largest in the Western Hemisphere and employed more than 2,250.

In 1954, North American Aviation bought 56 acres of farmland in the West Valley from Warner Ranch. The next year it began constructing a $94 million - in 1950s dollars - plant beside two-lane, pepper tree-lined Canoga Avenue for a new company division, called Rocketdyne, to build rocket engines.

Rocketdyne put out engines that powered the Atlas and Thor ballistic missiles and the Redstone rocket that put the first U.S. satellite into orbit.

Then it went to work on the first, second and third stage rocket engines for the Saturn V that propelled Americans to the moon and later created the space shuttle's main engines.

Powering the Saturn V's first stage were five huge F-1 engines, the most powerful rocket engines ever built, each producing 1.5 million pounds of thrust. A surviving F-1 now decorates the Canoga Park plant's front lawn.

``We have had a part in just about every space initiative in the U.S. since the 1950s,'' said Rocketdyne spokesman Dan Beck.

In the 1950s, it was considered essential for new Rocketdyne employees to travel up the steep road to the Santa Susana range to see a rocket engine test, recalled Jim McCafferty, former manager of publications and graphics.

``We were less jaded then, and when a Redstone or G-38 Navaho cut loose, you got a gut feeling that there really was something happening,'' McCafferty wrote for a Rocketdyne 35th anniversary book.

McCafferty recalled the rocket tests that shook the valley's tract homes inspired a ditty to the tune of ``Clementine'':

``When there's thunder on the mountains

Every evening just at 9

And your walls begin to tremble

It's not God

It's Rocketdyne.''

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

PHOTO (1) Lockheed increased staff when it got a 1940 contract to build Hudson patrol bombers for Great Britain.

Photo courtesy of Lockheed Martin Skunk Works

(2--3) The B-29 Super Fortress, above, was produced by Boeing. The Valley produced airplanes used during World War II, such as this B-17, left, at Van Nuys Airport in 1992.

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