Spreckles Promotes San Diego and Curtiss Starts the Flying School at North Island

  While Glenn Curtiss was at the Los Angeles Air Meet, through the urging of the San Diego Aero Club, the Spreckels-owned Coronado Beach Company offered Glenn Curtiss the use of North Island for a period of three years.  Curtiss later wrote “North Island, lying in San Diego Bay, a mile across from the city, was turned over to me by its owners, the Spreckels Company.  It is a flat, sandy island about four miles long and two miles wide with a number of good fields for land flights.  The beaches on both ocean and bay sides are good, affording level stretches for starting or landing an airplane.  Besides, the beaches were necessary to the water experiments I wished to make. North Island is uninhabited except by hundreds of jackrabbits, cottontails, snipe and quail.  It joins Coronado Island by a narrow sandspit on the south side, which is often washed by the high tides. Otherwise the two islands are separated by a strip of shallow water a mile long and a couple of hundred yards wide called ‘Spanish Bight.’

  Colonization of North Island began when Glenn Curtiss arrived with his wife Lena and several others from Hammondsport. The hay barn was converted into a hangar and the San Diego Aero Club added two more. The latter were covered only with canvas and tarpaper which blew off with some regularity. For the seaplanes, Curtiss built a hangar on the beach of the Spanish Bight.  Then it took a crew ten days to clear a half mile long landing field of weeds and sagebrush.  Located on the south end of the island, the field gave the flyers easy access to the “smooth and shallow” waters of the small inlet.