Kermit Weeks and his Fantasy of Flight team are back at their home base in Polk City, Florida, after spending a week earlier this month prepping Howard Hughes’ Sikorsky S-43 for transport. This is the plane that Hughes had originally planned to use for a record-breaking around the world flight. CAA delays and the arrival of a faster plane made him leave this beautiful seaplane on the ramp.
While Hughes was using the Sikorsky for some water landing tests on Lake Mead, a crash landing send the plane to the bottom of the lake, killing two other passengers and almost killing Hughes as well. He had the airplane salvaged and refit it as his personal executive transport business and (ahem) Hollywood starlets to exotic (and not so exotic) locations.
There are only three of these beautiful planes left in the world. Kermit plans on restoring the aircraft to airworthiness.
On this day in 1864 President Lincoln signed a bill drafted by both houses of the 38th Congress of the United States officially creating the Yosemite Grant. While Yellowstone ultimately became the first National Park, this was the first instance of park land being set aside for preservation and public use by the federal government. The grant was the result of citizens like Galen Clark and Senator John Conness advocating heavily for protection of the area. John Muir later led a successful movement to establish a larger national park encompassing not just the Yosemite Valley, but surrounding mountains and forests as well.
With their usual regard for conservation and the environment, the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (DWP)continues to display their professional ineptitude and scandalous behavior. All efforts to protect and restore Mono Lake have been undermined by the DWP since they made a unilateral power-grab of lake monitoring operations and started diverting $10,000,000 in water per year. Everything the DWP is doing is directly in violation of the rules set in 1998 by the State Water Board.
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