Hughes Airport (California) was a historic 380-acre private airfield built in 1940 by industrialist Howard Hughes in the Culver City area of Los Angeles. Once boasting the longest private runway on the West Coast, it served as the bustling nerve center for the Hughes Aircraft Company, where highly classified aerospace technologies, radar systems, and military aircraft were developed. Its most famous creation was the iconic "Spruce Goose" (the Hughes H-4 Hercules flying boat), which was built inside the airport's massive, seven-story wooden hangar, the largest of its kind.
Following the airport’s closure in 1985, the entire site underwent a massive revitalization. Today, the former airfield is completely transformed into Playa Vista, a thriving, master-planned residential and high-tech neighborhood known as part of LA's "Silicon Beach". The historic Spruce Goose Hangar has been meticulously preserved and creatively repurposed by ZGF Architects into a spectacular, multi-level tech campus for Google, featuring elevated walkways and open workspaces that pay tribute to its rich aviation history
Explore Utopia · LocationsReal place, referenced in the fiction
Hughes Airport
Culver City, California
Open in Google MapsHoward Hughes's real private airfield in Culver City, built by Hughes Aircraft Company for flight testing. In the fiction, it's from a test flight in the late 1930s that Hughes first finds the uncharted island that becomes Utopia.
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