Miramar is the city's front porch to the military

MIRAMAR: For three days in September, the fence line around Marine Corps Air Station Miramar effectively disappeared. The 2026 edition of the air show, billed as America's Air Show, ran September 25 through 27, and the crowds that passed through the gates of an installation in the geographic middle of San Diego were as much the point as the flying.

That geography is the point. Miramar is not a remote base glimpsed from a highway. It is 23,000 acres of Marine Corps aviation surrounded on all sides by the city, and the air show is the one weekend a year when the relationship runs in both directions: the public comes onto the base, and the base shows the public what it does.

Photo: Sgt. Jamean Berry, U.S. Marine Corps (public domain)

What the show is for

The flying program is the draw, and the Blue Angels are the headliners, but the show's real function is civic. San Diego is a military town in a way few American cities are: Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard installations ring the bay and the mesa, and tens of thousands of active-duty personnel and their families live here. The air show is where that fact becomes visible and celebratory rather than abstract.

It is also, quietly, a recruiting and retention instrument. The static displays, the meet-the-Marines tents, the sheer noise of tactical aviation overhead: all of it makes the case that the military is not a distant institution but a neighbor with open gates, at least for a weekend.

The neighbor the city forgets it has

The rest of the year, Miramar is mostly sound: the departure corridors, the night operations, the occasional noise complaint at a community meeting. The air show inverted that, turning the installation's least neighborly quality, its noise, into the attraction. Crowds came to stand under it this year. For a city that sometimes treats its military presence as background, that is worth noticing.

Photo: Erik Drost / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)