Hybla Valley Airport

The Alexandria Airport was established in 1925-26 by Elvin W. Robertson who had started a flying business offering sightseeing rides from a field along the Potomac and got displaced by the site’s new landowners.

At his newly licensed airport, Robertson's Mount Vernon School of Aeronautics (later Mount Vernon Airways) offered flight instruction. His business flourished for a time benefiting greatly from the flying fad inspired by Lindbergh’s 1928 flight from New York to Paris.

A 1929 Commerce Department Airway Bulletin described Alexandria Airport as consisting of “a 110 acre sod field, measuring 3,000' x 2,300', with one 140' x 60' hangar situated at the northeast corner of the field.” By 1936, Commerce’s Airway Bulletin further described the same airport as “a commercial field offering facilities for servicing aircraft, day and night.”

By the late 1930’s the neighborhood airfield also began to be know by the name Hybla Valley Airport, though maps of the times seemed to interchange the Alexandria and Hybla Valley prefixes. As WWII approached the field was taken over by the Navy to train military pilots. After the war, Robertson reclaimed his airport.

Meanwhile, from 1931 until 1942 William Robert Ashburn worked as the Fixed Based Operator (FBO) at . In 1945, after WWII, and with most airways reopened to civilian flights, Ashburn acquired the “Alexandria Airport at Hybla Valley,” as it was also known, from Robertson’s Mount Vernon Airways.

Ashburn wanted to make his airport the regional light airplane center for the DC Metro area. Among the many, then innovative, passenger-centered improvements he made in pursuit of that goal were the construction of a terminal restaurant and a passenger lounge with arcades and vending machines. The multi-runway field, considered one of the largest private fields in the area, contained three large maintenance and storage hangars and a two story school facility.

By 1945, the Haire Publishing Company Airport Directory described the now commonly named Hybla Valley Airport as having “4 gravel runways (the longest a 5,280' northeast/southwest strip), and 4 hangars.” The directory further stated that “Ashburn Flying Service operated 30 airplanes, with another 50 or 60 tied down around them.” After all of his improvements and the upswing of business, Ashburn’s base operation was indeed considered one of the best in the mid-Atlantic region.

At its peak, in the early 1950s, the airport had grown to 179 acres, had gravel and clay runways, and provided flight instruction at a cost of $11/hour for Dual Instruction and $8/hour for Solo. The typical pilot training course cost $198 Dual and $136 Solo, plus $1 for a log book.

The airport thrived, despite the close-by competition from Beacon Field Airport, but eventually fell prey to the public’s changing interest in private flying and the economic pull of better returns on property developed differently. The airport closed April 4, 1956, 32 years after it opened and three years before the 27-year-old Beacon Field Airport closed.

For more information about Hybla Valley’s airport be sure to check out the forthcoming history of the airfield to be found at www.beaconfieldairport.com.