History
The Half Moon Bay Airport is located approximately 20 miles south of San Francisco. It was constructed by the California State Highway Department for the U.S. Army in 1942 as an auxiliary airfield for Salinas Army Air Base.
Known as Half Moon Bay Flight Strip, the airport supported Salinas AAF's ground support mission to train light observation and reconnaissance squadrons. These would have been light aircraft and fighters modified with camera equipment. Salinas Army Air base also had the mission of conducting coastal patrols. As such, the airfield would have been garrisoned by a detachment of the 301st Base Headquarters and Air Base Squadron. With the reorganization of the Army Air Forces that took place in the first quarter of 1944, the Site was transferred to Air Technical Service Command and garrisoned by its own unit, the 4159th Army Air Forces Base Unit (Air Base). The mission of this unit was to operate the airfield for emergency landings, transient aircraft, and training missions. Other than refueling aircraft, no aircraft services would have been available.
On 1 June 1945, the War Department issued a five year permit to the U.S. Navy to operate the Site as "Outlying Field, Half Moon Bay". Half Moon Bay field became an outlying field for Naval Air Station Moffett Field, to furnish facilities for utility aircraft providing target towing service for the Anti-Aircraft Training Center, Point Montara, California.
Following the end of World War II, San Mateo County acquired the airport from the Navy in 1947. The airport has served a variety of roles over the years and is currently an important business, transportation and emergency service asset to the community.
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“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)