Emory Ranch Airport

16 years ago Gene Glasscock and his mule team passed through Ocotillo on his cross country trip

On March 1, 1925, a ticket from Los Angeles to San Diego cost $14.50 one way — and you rode in a hole cut into a war-surplus trainer. ✈️

T. Claude Ryan and Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Mahoney ran their Los Angeles–San Diego Air Line out of Dutch Flats, a patch of bare dirt near what is now Midway Drive and Barnett Avenue. Their first airliner was a Standard J-1, a World War I trainer with a four-passenger cabin cut into the fuselage; the pilot sat behind the passengers in the open, in helmet and goggles. Later they pressed a converted Douglas Cloudster into service, big enough for around ten.

The schedule was simple: leave Los Angeles at 9 a.m., leave San Diego at 4 p.m., every day. Round trip, $22.50. It has long been billed as the first regularly scheduled passenger air service flown year-round entirely over the continental United States — a claim historians still argue about, since seaplane lines were running published schedules years earlier.

The airline itself lasted barely a year. Ryan and Mahoney dissolved their partnership in November 1926, and the shop turned to building airplanes instead.

A dirt field, a surplus trainer, and a printed timetable. That was the beginning of commercial flight in this town.