I recognized Mt. Kagel while checking out hulu.com when I stumbled upon Emergency season1 episode 5 Dealer's Wild from 1972, A story about a pilot with a heart attack and his son lands the plane.
I grew up in Sylmar from 1971 to 1990 I use to go watch the planes take off and land when we would go to the swap meet right next door.
You can also see Kagel in the back ground in the old CHIPS episodes a good deal of them were filmed in Sylmar and some episodes at the same airport. Most of the freeway scenes used the 210 it was not open yet and under construction.
When I was a student pilot in '63, my home base was Whiteman, right next door to San Fernando airport. Right beside the airport was the San Fernando drag strip; it shows in the airport plan above. On one of my early solo flights out of Whiteman I decided to drop into San Fernando for a look at it, but lined up on the drag strip instead of the runway next door. No one had told me there was a drag strip there and it looked like the best part of the airport from the air making the airport's runway look like a taxiway in comparison. So I thought the drag strip was the runway and that's where I landed. Once on the ground I was surprised to see that the airport had disappeared, there were no other airplanes in sight, nor hangars or fuel trucks or all the airport stuff I had just flown over while on approach. Turns out the drag strip was on a terraced strip about 30 feet lower than the elevation of the airport so that the airport wasn't visible from below. Very confusing for awhile until a truck drove up to advise me of my mistake and to watch out for the wires that crossed over the drag strip near the south end. How embarrassing.
In the mid 80s we (SHGA) convened our landing area a few hundred yards south of our current flight park, more in line with Simshaw Ave where it tees at Gridley. At that time San Fernando Airport was still operating and their traffic pattern's base leg was directly above our LZ. Shortly after that the airport closed and was replaced by the shopping center on Foothill between Maclay and Arroyo.
