Mojave Air & Space Port

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Mojave Air & Space Port
Satellite image of the airport
Characteristics
ICAO code KMHV
IATA code MHV
Coordinates

35 ° 3 '34 "  N , 118 ° 9' 7"  W Coordinates: 35 ° 3 '34 "  N , 118 ° 9' 7"  W.
Height above MSL 851 m (2792  ft )
Transport links
Distance from the city center 1 km northeast of Mojave, California
Street CA 14 / CA 58
Basic data
opening 1935
surface 1213 ha
Flight
movements 		17,489 (2015/16)
Runways
04/22 1447 m × 18 m asphalt
08/26 2149 m × 30 m asphalt
12/30 3811 m × 61 m asphalt, concrete

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The Mojave Air & Space Port is an airport in the Mojave Desert in the US state of California . In civil aviation it is mainly used as a cargo airport. In addition, it is primarily known as a storage space for temporarily decommissioned aircraft. There are also companies that deal with the dismantling and scrapping of aircraft. Due to its location and facilities, it is often used for filming. Since the launch of SpaceShipOne in June 2004, the airport has also been approved as a launch site for civil space travel and is used by several private space companies as a test site.

history

The Mojave Air & Space Port was founded in 1935 as an airfield for civil use after a small airfield had existed near the town of Mojave since the late 1920s . In 1942 the US government took over the operation of the airfield and used it as the "Mojave Marine Corps Auxiliary Air Station" for military purposes. During this time there was only one small airfield with two runways called Myer Field in the immediate vicinity of today's Mojave Air & Space Port for civil flight operations in this region.

Military use ended in 1959, and it was during this time that Myer Field was also abandoned. In 1961, the management of Mojave Airport was transferred to Kern County , California. After the withdrawal of the military, apart from a few training flights with Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8 aircraft , the airport was initially quiet. The runways were even occasionally used to dry raisins during this period. In 1965, an American Airlines Boeing 707 crashed during a training flight about a quarter of a mile from the targeted runway. On June 16, 1976, a North American P-51 Mustang crashed while approaching Mojave Airport. The pilot of the machine was killed in this accident. During a flight maneuver during a test flight at Mojave Airport, a Challenger 604 made by Bombardier Aerospace crashed on April 3, 1980, killing the pilot; two other inmates survived this accident.

After a disaster caused by the crash of a North American F-86 at an air show in Sacramento on September 24, 1972, in which 22 people were killed, the aircraft manufacturers and owners of historic aircraft began to do test and practice flights as well as for the Find aircraft storage for remote airports. This also led to a surge in importance for Mojave Airport. In the same year, the "East Kern Airport District" was founded to operate the airport and has since promoted the settlement of relevant companies. On June 17, 2004, Mojave Airport was approved as a spaceport and changed the name to Mojave Air & Space Port. There are currently around 140 companies with around 1,300 employees based there.

Location and facilities

View of Mojave Airport
The tower of Mojave Airport

The IATA code of the Mojave Air & Space Port is MHV, the responsible flight information service of the Federal Aviation Administration is the Riverside Flight Service Station (FAA ID code: RAL). Its exact geographic position is 35 ° 03.56 'N 118 ° 09.11' W. It is located approximately 25 kilometers northwest of Edwards Air Force Base at an altitude of approximately 850 meters (2,791 ft.) Above sea level. Other civil airfields near Mojave Air & Space Port include California City Municipal Airport (FAA ID code: L71) in California City, California, and General Wm J Fox Airfield (FAA ID code: WJF) in Lancaster, California. The airport has a tower, an illuminated wind indicator and three runways, two of which are equipped with beacon lights (edge ​​lights):

runway length width beacon
12/30 3,811 m (12,503 ft) 61 m (200 ft) high intensity
08/26 2,149 m (7,051 ft) 30 m (98 ft) medium intensity
04/22 1,447 m (4,747 ft) 18 m (59 ft)

Use in civil aviation

The traffic volume is currently around 50 to 60 flight movements per day and is divided into around 54 percent civil through traffic, around 41 percent civil local traffic and around five percent military use. The Mojave Air & Space Port can be classified as a regional airport for passenger traffic and is of very limited relevance due to its location. In civil aviation, it is primarily used as a cargo airport with supra-regional importance and is accessible via the highways CA-14 ("Antelope Freeway", towards Los Angeles and northern Nevada ) and CA-58 (towards central California, Arizona and southern Nevada) as well as a rail connection (network operator Union Pacific Railroad , shared by the BNSF Railway ) with appropriate traffic connections. In addition, the Mojave Air & Space Port is home to the National Test Pilot School (NTPS), an academic training facility for test pilots for civil and military aviation, as well as a flight school for private individuals (Viking Aviation).

Aircraft storage, maintenance and scrapping

Parked aircraft at the Mojave Air & Space Port
A disused Boeing 767-200 from the former Ansett Australia at Mojave Air & Space Port

The Mojave Air & Space Port plays an important role for several special uses. Above all, this includes the storage of aircraft that have been temporarily shut down by the airlines, mostly for economic reasons. Among these “ aircraft storage locations ”, it is one of the best known, but it is not the largest in terms of the number of aircraft stored. Another representative is the Pinal Airpark near Marana . The price for parking a passenger aircraft at Mojave Air & Space Port is between 250 and 500 US dollars per month, depending on the size of the aircraft. Its advantages when storing aircraft are the dry desert climate, the remote location and the fact that aircraft can be parked on the hard and dry desert ground without asphalting or concreting the ground.

For reasons of confidentiality, the name and logo of the airline are usually masked in the case of temporarily decommissioned aircraft, so that the competing companies cannot draw any conclusions about the economic situation of the company concerned. When Braniff International Airways went bankrupt in 1982, their entire fleet, which consisted of 62 Boeing 727 , Boeing 747 and Douglas DC-8 aircraft , was parked at Mojave Airport. In the period immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 , some newly built Boeing aircraft were flown to Mojave Airport for interim storage immediately after completion in Seattle, as the airlines in question for the aircraft they had ordered due to the civil aviation crisis that followed the attacks had no use. The number of aircraft stored at Mojave Air & Space Port and other “aircraft parking lots” fluctuates widely and can be an indicator of the economic situation in the aviation industry. However, the number of parked aircraft can also increase in growth phases, primarily due to large-scale decommissioning in the event of model changes, for example with the introduction of the Boeing 747 jumbo jet, or the introduction of fundamentally new technologies such as the transition from propeller drive to jet engines in civil aviation .

Other important segments of based at the Mojave Air and Space Port companies are maintenance and remodeling of aircraft, including renovation of paint or repainting when changes of ownership, as well as the dismantling and scrapping of decommissioned aircraft ( airplane graveyard , Eng. Aircraft boneyard ). For a not inconsiderable number of aircraft parts and components, it is also common to reuse them as used spare parts, and entire cockpits can be converted into simulators. The 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) in Tucson , Arizona has a similar task in the military sector .

Only the company ams Aircraft Maintenance Service offered similar services in Germany until its bankruptcy in 2009 at the former Ahlhorn air base .

Take-off and test site for aerospace companies

On June 17, 2004, Mojave Airport received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration as a spaceport for the horizontal launch of reusable spacecraft. Since then, the airport has had the suffix “Civilian Aerospace Test Center”. Four days later, on June 21, the Mojave Air & Space Port took off with the SpaceShipOne , developed by Scaled Composites , the first privately financed space flight in the history of aerospace. A number of other private space companies or projects (e.g. XCOR Aerospace, Orbital Sciences Corporation, Interorbital Systems, Pacific Rocket Society, Space Launch Corporation, Trans Lunar Research, Rocket Propulsion Engineering Company) use the Mojave Air & Space Port as a test site.

Scaled Composites is also the developer of the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer , which was built on behalf of co-owner Steve Fossett . From March 1st to 3rd, 2005, he was the first person to complete a non-stop orbit around the earth alone in this aircraft in around 67 hours. The first test flight of the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer took place on October 21, 2004 from Mojave Air & Space Port.

On April 13, 2019, the first flight of the Scaled Composites Stratolaunch , a space rocket carrier aircraft built here for Stratolaunch Systems by Scaled Composites, took place.

Incidents

Important information is missing from this article or section. Help Wikipedia by researching and pasting it .

Film production

The Mojave Air & Space Port is often used for filming, especially action films and commercials . The airfield has some special equipment and facilities for this and offers the possibility of renting complete runways for filming. In addition, there is a large selection of modern and historic aircraft available, as well as aircraft that have been approved for scrapping for spectacular film scenes. Further advantages are the large amount of space the airport offers and its proximity to Los Angeles and Hollywood . Well-known films that contain scenes from Mojave Airport are, for example, Die Hard 2 , Speed , Thirteen Days , Waterworld and the video for the music track "Bodies" by Robbie Williams .

Web links

Commons : Mojave Air & Space Port  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b AirportIQ 5010: Mojave Air & Space Port. gcr1.com, accessed August 29, 2017 .
  2. ↑ a b History. (No longer available online.) MojaveAirport.com, archived from the original on September 19, 2017 ; accessed on August 29, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mojaveairport.com
  3. ^ Runway Information. MojaveAirport.com, accessed August 29, 2017 .
  4. ↑ Stratolaunch First Flight Stratolaunch, youtube.com, published April 13, 2019. - Video (0:58)
  5. ^ Tony Eastwood, John Roach: Piston Engine Airliner Production List . West Drayton: The Aviation Hobby Shop, 1996, ISBN 0 907 178 61 8 , p. 38.
  6. ↑ Accident Report B-377 N90942 , Aviation Safety Network (English), accessed on February 18 2020th
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on July 16, 2005 .