Founded in 1940 as the Las Vegas Army Air Corps Flexible Gunnery School, Nellis Air Force Base now covers over 2 million acres of land in southern Nevada—2.1 million acres for the bombing and gunnery range and 11,000 acres for the base. Its purpose is to train pilots. The original base included a rudimentary runway used by Western Air Express for commercial passenger and airmail flights. With the nation's entry into World War II, the base expanded to include barracks, aircraft hangars, and runways long enough to accommodate bombers. Since the 1950s, Nellis has continued to grow, eventually becoming a self-sufficient town of military, administrative, and domestic buildings. In the 1980s many of the wartime structures were stuccoed and given red tile roofs to create a Spanish Colonial Revival appearance, but overall the buildings are interesting because of the variety of types and forms they represent rather than for aesthetic reasons.