Prevost's path from aviation-struck child to airport owner followed a long, grease-stained arc. In 1984 he took over the Vintage Aircraft Company, which had been offering biplane rides since its founding in 1975, and turned it into something more ambitious. The Stearman biplanes remained the bread and butter, their open cockpits giving wine country visitors an experience that no tasting room could match. But Prevost was also a restorer, the kind of pilot who saw a pile of corroded parts and imagined a flying machine. His most remarkable project was a Curtiss P-40 Kittyhawk, a World War II fighter that he spent nine years rebuilding from wreckage to mint condition. That aircraft now sits alongside a North American P-51 Mustang, both available not just for display but for flight. The museum's collection also includes a de Havilland Canada DHC-1 Chipmunk, a Beechcraft D18S, a Christen Eagle aerobatic biplane, a Piper L-4B Grasshopper, and several Boeing-Stearman PT-17 trainers.

Sonoma Valley Airport was founded in 1946 by Wally Reichelt, part of the wave of small airfields that appeared across California as returning pilots looked for places to keep flying. Its first California-certificated runway opened in August 1959. The airport sits in Schellville, a tiny community at the southern end of the Sonoma Valley, surrounded by the wetlands that drain into San Pablo Bay. Two asphalt runways serve the field today: the primary Runway 07/25 at 2,700 feet, and the shorter Runway 17/35 at 1,513 feet, which requires prior permission. It is not the kind of airport that handles jets or scheduled service. It is the kind of airport where you can hear the radial engine of a Stearman warming up on a Saturday morning, where the smell of avgas mixes with the salt air drifting in from the bay. Prevost became co-owner in 2002 and sole owner in 2008, making him both the airport's operator and its most passionate tenant.

The museum's tagline captures its philosophy precisely. These are not aircraft behind velvet ropes. Many of them fly regularly, piloted by Prevost and the museum's small team, who between them have logged more than 10,000 hours. Visitors can book rides in the open-cockpit Stearmans and see the Sonoma Valley from the same vantage point that training pilots did during World War II. The P-40 Kittyhawk, painted in its wartime livery, is a particular draw. Prevost began planning for the museum formally in June 2010, originally envisioning it as the California Aviation Heritage Museum. The name changed, but the mission held steady: preserve flyable vintage aircraft and let people experience them not as artifacts but as living machines. It is one thing to read a placard about horsepower and wingspan. It is another to stand behind a radial engine as it coughs to life and feel the propwash flatten the grass.

Sonoma Valley is known for pinot noir and chardonnay, not for warbirds. The juxtaposition is part of the museum's charm. The airport occupies a patch of flat ground in the Carneros region, one of California's premier grape-growing areas, where the fog rolls in from the bay most mornings and burns off by noon. From the air, the surrounding landscape is a patchwork of green and gold vineyard blocks, punctuated by the dark water of the Sonoma Creek marshes. The museum sits at the edge of this, a few hangars and a gravel parking lot that would be easy to miss from the highway. But approach by air, descending over the wetlands toward Runway 25, and the collection comes into view: silver and olive-drab fuselages parked on the ramp, wings catching the afternoon light. There is no grand entrance, no admission booth. Just aircraft, the people who keep them flying, and the same airstrip that changed an eleven-year-old's life.