A Look Back:

Before it was renamed John Wayne Airport, the old Eddie Martin Airport was a training ground for stunt pilots known as barnstormers and the site of a record-breaking flight by aviator Howard Hughes. A troubled young Corona del Mar woman leaped to her death from a barnstormer’s airplane near the airport.

In 1923, aviation pioneer Eddie Martin built an air strip and founded a flying school on land owned by the Irvine Co. John Wayne Airport now sits on the site.

In 1926, Martin taught Sacha “Peggy” Hall to fly at his aviation school. Female pilots were so rare in those days, the Los Angeles Times published a story to commemorate Hall’s first solo flight.

“Flying is ideally suited to the female sex, [Hall] said, because of the safety of the air,” The Times reported on July 6, 1926. “It’s really much more safe up in the air than down on the ground with motor cars chasing you all the time.”

Hall later went on to perform as a stunt pilot at air shows across the region.

Famed film producer and aviator Hughes set a world record for air speed over the Eddie Martin Airport on Sept. 13, 1935, according to historical news accounts.

Hughes reached a speed of 347 mph over the airport, flying in his custom-made Hughes H-1 Racer. The plane’s engine sputtered and died after Hughes set the record, forcing the aviator to crash land into a nearby beet field.

The plane skidded to a halt in the field, without its landing gear. Hughes was unharmed.

“My gas supply in one take was exhausted,” Hughes said as he stepped unhurt from the racer, The Times reported. “When I switched on the other tank the motor didn’t take it... The stoppage in gas came so suddenly that I did not have time to lower the retractable landing gear.”

Famed aviator Amelia Earhart watched Hughes fly from the airfield that day, The Times reported. She praised his skilled emergency landing.

In 1940, a 24-year-old Corona del Mar woman tricked a pilot from the airport into helping her commit suicide. The woman, Louise Drolet, jumped 1,000 feet to her death from the cockpit of pilot Joe Hagar’s airplane, the Los Angeles Times reported March 23, 1940.

Drolet tricked Hager into taking her up in his plane, telling him “she wanted to win a $5 bet with a boy friend who said she was afraid to fly,” The Times reported. Drolet also insisted in riding in the rear seat of an airplane with an open cockpit, the pilot later told investigators.

During the flight, Hager felt the plane lurch and looked back to see Drolet trying to jump out of the cockpit. He tried to grab her, but she slipped out of his grasp and plunged to her death.

Investigators from the coroner’s office later found a suicide note in Drolet’s car.

The Eddie Martin Airport became public property in 1939, according to the terms of a land swap deal between the Irvine Co. and the County of Orange.

The airport served as a military base during WWII, and a new, 22,000 square-foot terminal to accommodate as many as 400,000 commercial airline passengers a year was constructed in 1967. The Orange County Board of Supervisors renamed the airport in honor of the late actor John Wayne in 1979.