If you live anywhere near Skyway Road, the sound of small planes taking off and landing is just weather. You stop noticing it the same way you stop noticing the Caltrain horn. Then, for something like ninety minutes on one Saturday morning each June, the sound changes. The tower goes quiet for regular traffic. What comes down the runway instead sounds smaller, buzzier, and somehow busier than a single aircraft has any business sounding.
That's the Biggest Little Air Show, and the fact that San Carlos Airport agrees to shut down for it every year says more about this side of town than most residents realize.
A Working Runway, on Loan
San Carlos Airport, identifier KSQL, is not a museum prop. It's a working general aviation field with real traffic, real approach patterns, and a real tower. Once a year, the Hiller Aviation Museum, which sits on the airport grounds at 601 Skyway Road, borrows the actual runway for the Biggest Little Air Show, and the airport closes to regular arrivals and departures so radio-controlled jets, aerobatic helicopters, and drones can use real pavement instead of a parking lot or a field somewhere.
The closure window has moved some year to year. This year's show, held June 13, closed the runway from 10:30 a.m. to noon. In 2024 the closure ran two and a half hours. Either number is real airspace, handed over on purpose to hobbyists for an afternoon.
The show has run for more than a decade, sponsored most years by Peaxy, a San Jose software firm, and it sells out with enough regularity that Hiller's own event page for the 2026 show is simply marked sold out. Once the crowd clears, the intersection of Redwood Shores Parkway and Airport Drive backs up with departing cars, which is its own small piece of evidence that plenty of people who don't otherwise think about model aircraft show up for this one.
One of the standing crowd favorites is a scratch-built aircraft named Henrietta, a mothership that carries five smaller radio-controlled planes stacked above and below its wings. Partway through the flight, pilot Edric Yamamoto releases them one at a time, and the group breaks into a ribbon-cutting dogfight where pilots try to slice each other's trailing streamers mid-air. It is the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a museum brochure, only in the recaps written by people who were actually standing on the tarmac.
Once the models clear out, the runway reopens for full-size aircraft, and in recent years that reopening has led with something other than a commuter flight. In 2024 the first aircraft back on the field was a U.S. Coast Guard MH-65 Dolphin helicopter, running a search and rescue demonstration, its first appearance at the show in several years. That same afternoon closed with a Sukhoi SU-26 aerobatic routine from the Sukhoi West Demo Team, pilots Randy Howell and Cory Lovell, both of whom spend plenty of their non-airshow time coaching aspiring pilots around the Bay Area.
If you're planning to catch next year's show, plan your parking before you plan your outfit. Museum parking is free but limited, and the museum directs overflow to lots down Skyway Road, with a walk of up to three quarters of a mile or a shuttle bus that runs until 2 p.m. Given how fast this one sells out most years, that's not logistics to sort out the week before.
It Didn't Stop Being a Field Trip
Most people's relationship with Hiller starts and ends with a single memory: a school trip in second or third grade, a cockpit you got to sit in, a model plane from the gift shop your kid begged for. What doesn't always register is that the museum, founded by helicopter pioneer Stanley Hiller Jr. and open since 1998, kept running the whole time nobody was thinking about it.
The building holds close to fifty aircraft, historic and experimental, and the programming around them never stopped at field trips, which the museum still runs for grades Pre-K through 12. After-School Aviators runs structured flight-themed activities on weekday afternoons, with the museum handling check-in and supervision until parents arrive. Aviation Camp runs all summer, this year from June 1 through September 4, for campers entering grades K through 7, and it's still in its final stretch as of this month. Birthday parties book the party room year round, with museum admission for every guest built into the package. None of that requires a kid currently enrolled in second grade. It just requires remembering the museum is there between the field trips.
What's Actually on the Calendar This Fall
If your last visit was years ago, here's what you'd walk into if you went back before Halloween.
| Date | Event | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| August 29 | Paper Airplane Day | Fold and test-fly paper aircraft, 11 a.m. to noon |
| September 6 | Kids Day | Paint the museum's Cessna Cardinal, check out an airplane or helicopter cockpit, 10 a.m. to noon |
| September 12 | Hops & Props Beer Fest | Microbrews, live music, and aircraft on the tarmac, noon to 4 p.m. |
| September 26 | Exotic Car Show | Ferrari, Lamborghini, McLaren, and Porsche parked alongside a Cirrus aircraft, 10 a.m. to noon |
| October 3 | 22nd Annual Benefit | "A New Vision in Space," the museum's yearly fundraiser, 5 to 9 p.m. |
| October 31 | Great Pumpkin Bash | Mini pumpkin painting, a costume contest, and the gallery decked out for Halloween, 10 a.m. to noon |
That's six distinct reasons to show up between now and Halloween, and not one of them requires you to be researching schools or planning a move. They require living within a few minutes of Skyway Road and wanting something to do on a Saturday morning. Full details and any schedule changes run through Hiller's own event calendar.
Why This Matters More Than It Looks
None of this is really about airplanes. It's about how a nonprofit museum ended up woven tightly enough into a working airport's operations that the airport reorganizes itself around the museum's calendar once a year, and tightly enough into the town's family routines that a place most residents associate with one childhood field trip actually runs something close to a monthly calendar of its own.
San Carlos doesn't have many institutions that can talk an airport into closing its runway for a Saturday morning. The fact that it has one, tucked into the Bayshore side of town away from the Laurel Street crowds, tells you something true about how this city works. It bends its infrastructure around its community fixtures more than it lets on, and it does that quietly enough that plenty of longtime residents haven't noticed since their own kid's field trip.
If you're the kind of person who reads to the end of a post like this because you already live here and just wanted to know what you'd missed, that's exactly who I write for. I'm Bob, and between showings I spend a fair amount of time chasing down the small stuff that makes San Carlos worth knowing block by block. If you want more of it, or you'd rather just talk shop about anything happening in this town, real estate included, find me at bredelhomes.com or give me a call.
