Retired Col. Charlie Quilter, a decorated Marine fighter pilot who served in Vietnam, Bosnia, Desert Shield, Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom, was deeply saddened Tuesday, Nov. 7, as he watched video of a World War II-era hangar on the former Tustin Marine Corps Air Station go up in flames.
“Oh geez, it’s awful, that’s unbelievable,” he said while on the phone watching part of history collapse. “Generations of Marine helicopter pilots trained and deployed from there.”
Read more: Fire destroys massive, historic north hangar at shuttered Tustin airfield
The north hangar, which with its twin to the south on the property was built in 1942, will have to be demolished, authorities said Tuesday even as flames continued to burn through the giant structure. The two mostly wooden hangars – 17 stories tall, 1,000 feet long and 300 feet wide – were quickly built at the base to house 12 blimps to patrol the West Coast against Japanese submarines. Their use evolved as military needs changed in the following decades but have been vacant for over 20 years.
Quilter’s father, Maj. Gen. Charles Quilter, was the commanding general of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing from 1966 to ’68 at the Tustin station and the younger Quilter said he still remembers being around the hangars as a kid in the 1950s.
“Orange County was extremely rural, none of the development you see now,” he said. “It was just wall-to-wall citrus and rural roads. All of a sudden, these things loomed out of the rural setting. These two structures just dominated the skyline.”
“You realize it is one of these structures that get built in times of national emergency, and now it’s gone,” Quilter, a military historian, added. “And with it, for the Marine Corps, the largest piece of Marine aviation history that survives. At least one survives to be the monument of historical memory.”
But Quilter, a longtime Laguna Beach resident, also noted the loss for the greater Orange…
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