For decades, Hangar 3 moored and maintained the aircraft that kept us safe, but now it’s beyond repair.
Historic Hangar 3 undergoes demolition at Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif., on Monday, May 20, 2024. Hangar 3, built during World War II, will be gone by next March. There was an era when the cavernous structure, one of three hangars at Moffett Field between Mountain View and Sunnyvale, had the attention it deserved. Inside its historic wooden walls, generations of proud servicemembers moored and maintained the aircraft that defended us from predators.
Hangar 3 and its two siblings have been a famed part of the Peninsula’s landscape, punctuating the eastern horizon like giant gray anvils. Hangar 1 is easily viewed from Highway 101; Hangars 2 and 3, more distant, are best seen from the public Golf Club at Moffett Field. The news hit hard in Hangar 3’s close-knit community of veterans, now retired and scattered across the United States, who are connecting online to share photos and memories of a place that irrevocably changed their lives.
Aviator Larry Beck was on duty on August 5, 1962, the day actress Marilyn Monroe died. “Somehow people got the notion it was a security threat,” he wrote. “We were inundated with phone calls.” “It felt like family. There was camaraderie there,” said Charles Marotta, 71, of Las Vegas, a medical corpsman who tended to Hangar 3’s sick and injured. “We got them ready to go. We got them fixed when they came back.”
The size of six football fields, Hangar 3 could house six to 12 aircraft. Flared outer walls provided space for offices, a lab, a shop and storage. The Cold War brought new responsibilities. Part of Moffett Field’s so-called “Orion University,” it housed P-3 Orion patrol squadrons, which flew long, slow and low missions in search of Pacific threats.
“The place was busy 24 hours, seven days a week. There were always planes that needed maintaining,” said 57-year-old Tony Divito of Burlingame, who worked on planes’ weapons systems. “We were never closed.”
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