Aviation’s role in San Diego history can be summed up in the lives—and names– of two men. One was John Montgomery. In the late 19^th and early 20^th century, Montgomery was a physics professor at Santa Clara University in northern California, but he was also a researcher, experimentor and inventor in the then-new field of aviation, which at that point in time was still confined largely to hot-air balloons. The photo below, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, shows Montgomery in 1905 standing beside one of the gliders he built to engage in experimental, and brief, flights :

Some years earlier, in 1883, Montgomery took a similar device to a ridge at Otay Mesa, where his family owned some ranch property. There he leaped off the ridge and glided roughly 600 feet before landing, completing what’s considered one of the earliest controlled-wing flights in history.

San Diego’s sunny climate would be a boon to the development of aviation, both civil and military. World War I and its aftermath would see the establishment of Army and Navy air stations as well as aircraft manufacturing companies like Ryan and, in the mid-1930s, Consolidated.

Lindbergh Field would be opened in 1928 as the city of San Diego’s first municipal airport, but the ensuing decades would see smaller, privately-owned airfields pop up, often by private pilots offering air excursions as well as flight and mechanic schools and other flight-related services. One example of that was Bill Gibbs, a young pilot who took tourists on aerial tours and used the proceeds to buy his own plane. He did well enough offering excursion flights, as well as flying lessons, to take out a bank loan in 1937 that he used to buy land on Kearney Mesa where he built an airfield. Gibbs Field became the base for Gibbs Flying Service.

Below is a typical ad seen in San Diego newspapers from the 1930s through the late 1940s:

The City of San Diego purchased Gibbs Field from Bill Gibbs in 1947. In May of 1950 the city officially changed the name of Gibbs Field to Montgomery Field to honor John Montgomery’s pioneering flight on San Diego territory.

In a sense the city came full circle in 2016, when the airport’s name was changed again to Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport, the name it carries to this day.