As the son of an Air Force pilot, I’ve always loved aviation, and I’ve had a crazy bunch of aviation experiences, from taking the wheel of a Cessna at age 5 to going zero gravity to pulling 5g’s with an aerobatics pilot. All of that positioned me to be the right guy to profile Peter Jones, writer/director of a four-part history of SoCal aviation. It ran on the Golden State website, in Ventura Blvd, and in Southbay.

Excerpt:

Very early in Blue Sky Metropolis, Peter Jones’s four-part documentary on the history of aviation in Southern California, we see an old film clip of a propeller-driven dirigible attempting to take off during the 1910 Los Angeles International Air Meet in Dominguez Hills. It looks utterly preposterous. No one watching—then or now—could hold any hope of it getting airborne. But fly it does, as a nattily attired and apparently untethered pilot steers from an exposed framework underneath the behemoth airship.

The image says a great deal. It speaks to the audacity of early aviation pioneers, those magnificent men and women in their flying machines. It speaks to the power of dreams and to the can-do spirit of a collection of dreamers. And more specifically, it establishes Los Angeles—and all of Southern California—as the cynosure of a nascent movement to reach the sky, the heavens and beyond. The dreams and the dreamers belonged uniquely to Southern California.

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