Lake Tahoe Airport is a public airport three miles southwest of South Lake Tahoe, in El Dorado County, California. This general aviation airport covers 348acre and has one runway. The airport is sometimes called Tahoe Valley Airport.This high elevation airport in the Sierra Nevada Mountains just south of Lake Tahoe opened in 1959 with a 5900-ft runway. Starting in 1963 it had few airline flights: the first were Paradise Airlines Lockheed L-049 Constellations. Paradise ceased operations after a fatal accident in the mountains near Lake Tahoe and Pacific Air Lines arrived in 1964 with Fairchild F-27 turboprops. That summer, Lake Tahoe was on a "milk run" route flown with the F-27 by the airline: Pacific flight 771 operated a routing of Reno-Lake Tahoe-Sacramento-San Francisco-San Jose-Fresno-Bakersfield-Los Angeles-San Diego. In 1966 Pacific started operating the first jet service into Lake Tahoe with Boeing 727-100s flying a Los Angeles (LAX)-San Jose-Lake Tahoe round trip schedule. A 1966 Pacific Air Lines route map also depicted nonstop 727 service to San Francisco (SFO) and Reno from the airport. This 727 service lasted less than a year, and Tahoe did not see scheduled jet flights again until 1983. Following cessation of the Pacific 727 service, a ban on scheduled passenger airline jet operations at the airport was initiated. Pacific Air Lines resumed Fairchild F-27 service and successors Air West and Hughes Airwest also operated Fairchild F-27 turboprop flights until the early 1970s. For a number of years, air carriers initiating new flights had to use turboprop powered aircraft for their respective services into Lake Tahoe due to the jet ban with the Lockheed L-188 Electra propjet initially being flown by several airlines into the airport followed by other turboprop aircraft types operated by other air carriers.
