The Navy built an airstrip at the Salton Sea in 1942 because the flat, isolated desert provided exactly the kind of training environment that preparing pilots for combat required: no obstacles, no witnesses, no weather surprises. The station served as an auxiliary to Naval Air Station San Diego and housed more than 600 men. When the war ended, it was disestablished. The Salton Sea had other plans for the runway.
Commissioned in 1942, the Naval Auxiliary Air Station Salton Sea operated through World War II as a training facility subordinate to NAS San Diego. The barracks accommodated more than 600 men, and the station's remote location — deep in the Colorado Desert, far from populated areas — made it suitable for the kind of intensive flight operations that required airspace without commercial traffic or populated areas below. The station was disestablished in 1946, its wartime purpose fulfilled. The flat desert terrain and the nearby sea remained, largely unchanged, as the military infrastructure was abandoned.
The Naval Air Facility at El Centro, about 27 miles away, used land near the former station for space program parachute testing until 1979 — taking advantage of the same open desert that had made the original station useful. By the time that program ended, the Salton Sea had begun to change the site's physical character. The sea, which has no natural outlet and whose level rises with agricultural and stormwater inflow, had crept over much of the former runway. By the time the Bureau of Land Management designated the area as a Hazardous Area of Critical Environmental Concern, the water had claimed significant portions of the original installation. In 2001, the Bureau of Reclamation tested modified snowmaking equipment at the site in an attempt to remove salt from the sea — a remediation experiment that failed due to energy costs and air quality concerns.
The Salton Sea's gradual encroachment over the old runway is a compressed version of the larger story of the sea itself: a body of water that exists only because of irrigation drainage, that has no predictable stable level, and whose shores have been host to a succession of uses — military, agricultural, recreational, and finally ecological crisis — that none of their planners fully anticipated. The former NAAS Salton Sea site now sits at the intersection of those competing histories: a hazardous area that was once a military installation, now partially submerged in a shrinking inland sea, with the remnants of a snowmaking salt-removal experiment and the designation of a BLM critical concern area marking successive attempts to manage a landscape that has consistently defied management.
The former Naval Auxiliary Air Station Salton Sea is located at approximately 33.19°N, 115.83°W on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea, near the community of Niland. The site is now partially submerged under Salton Sea waters, and the former runway area is not usable for aviation. The Salton Sea itself is the dominant visual landmark in this area — a large inland body of water visible from altitude throughout the Imperial Valley and eastern Coachella Valley. Its surface elevation fluctuates with changing inflow and evaporation. Nearest active airports: Brawley Municipal Airport (BWC, approximately 20 miles southeast), Naval Air Facility El Centro (NJK, approximately 27 miles south-southwest). The Salton Sea's shoreline and the Chocolate Mountains to the east are the primary visual references for navigation in this area.