For its first decade, Reid-Hillview was a modest affair -- one runway, unpaved, serving a community that was still more orchards than suburbs. The runway wasn't paved until 1946, and the field operated with a single strip until 1965, when a second runway was added. A control tower followed in October 1967, the airport growing in step with Silicon Valley's postwar expansion. The site itself carried older aviation history. The Evergreen district of San Jose, just to the east, was where pioneer aviator John J. Montgomery had experimented with gliders in 1911, decades before the Reids ever broke ground. By the time San Jose State University relocated its aviation program to Reid-Hillview in 2010, the airport had become a fixture of the region's identity -- a reliever airport for San Jose International, home to flight schools and flying clubs, a place where students earned their wings in Cessnas and Pipers on the same flatlands where Montgomery once tested homemade gliders.

On October 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake shattered highways and buckled bridges across the Bay Area. Mountain and coastal roads leading to Santa Cruz and Watsonville were blocked, cutting those communities off from ground-based relief. Reid-Hillview became the staging point for an emergency airlift. Over the following week, pilots flew an estimated 100 tons of supplies to Watsonville Municipal Airport -- food, water, medicine, the essentials that trucks could no longer deliver. John McAvoy and Bill Dunn of the Reid-Hillview Airport Association organized the effort and received the 1990 Grand Award from the Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission for their work. The airport reprised that emergency role during the SCU Lightning Complex fires in 2020, a reminder that small general aviation fields serve purposes no commercial airport can replicate.

Reid-Hillview sits in East San Jose, surrounded by schools, childcare centers, and residential neighborhoods. Twenty-one schools and childcare facilities operate within proximity of the airport. The community is predominantly low-income, largely Latino and Vietnamese-American. For years, local activists and county supervisors Blanca Alvarado and Cindy Chavez pushed for the airport's closure, arguing that the 100LL avgas burned by piston-engine aircraft was depositing lead across the neighborhood. Leaded aviation fuel accounts for roughly 70 percent of airborne lead in the United States -- a statistic that carries different weight depending on whether you live near an airport. In 2021, a study by Dr. Sammy Zahran found unsafe lead levels in the air above the airport's southeastern side, exceeding National Ambient Air Quality Standards. A county-commissioned study the same year found that children within 1.5 miles of the airport had blood lead levels of 0.83 micrograms per deciliter -- nearly double the levels recorded during the Flint water crisis.

The lead studies accelerated a timeline that had been building for years. In 2018, the Board of Supervisors voted to study consolidating general aviation at San Martin Airport, 20 miles south. That same year, and again the following year, the board rejected FAA funding that would have required keeping Reid-Hillview open through 2051. In November 2020, supervisors voted to begin closing the airport in 2031 -- the earliest date permitted under previously accepted federal grants. Then the lead data arrived. On August 16, 2021, airport officials announced that fixed-base operators would switch to unleaded fuel. Two days later, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to pursue closure as soon as the FAA approved, potentially as early as January 2022. Supervisor Cindy Chavez testified before the U.S. House Oversight Subcommittee on Environment, and the committee committed to declaring leaded aviation fuel a health hazard by 2023. One small airport in East San Jose had forced a national conversation.

The county envisions the airport's 179 acres as something fundamentally different -- a neighborhood built around the community it displaced. Plans call for housing, education, and economic opportunity in a part of San Jose that has long been underserved. The vision statement speaks of empowerment rooted in culture, diversity, and history. But closing an airport is never simple. Pilots worry about losing a field that served as both training ground and emergency lifeline. The county declined to fund an expansion of San Martin Airport as a replacement, raising concerns that displaced traffic would burden San Jose International, which is already capacity-constrained and bordered by its own low-income neighborhoods. Reid-Hillview's story -- from unpaved strip to earthquake lifeline to environmental justice flashpoint -- encapsulates the tension between what airports give a community and what they take from it.