Archive for January 14th, 2021

Obit watch: January 14, 2021.

Thursday, January 14th, 2021

Siegfried Fischbacher, the “Siegfried” in “Siegfried and Roy”.

You may remember Roy Horn passed away in May of last year.

Mary Catherine Bateson, cultural anthropologist (and, for the record, daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson).

Posted in Geek, History, Magic, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 289

Thursday, January 14th, 2021

Travel Thursday!

Today, a couple of exotic destinations. “Wings Over The West Indies” from our good friends at Pan Am. What makes this interesting is that it is from the 1940s, and features the Sikorsky S-40 flying boat.

And, for a little dose of something slightly more recent and in color…”Wings to Yugoslavia”, also from Pan Am, but this time dating to the 1960s.

One more fun one: “Up and Over”, a promo film made by Sikorsky promoting Los Angeles Airways (LAA). LAA provided helicopter service from various points around LA to the airports and to Disneyland. They also carried mail.

In April 1957 they scheduled 17 weekday departures from LAX to 11 heliports from North Hollywood to San Bernardino to Santa Ana to Long Beach; they didn’t fly to downtown Los Angeles.

The YouTube notes mention that they went out of business in 1971 after an acquisition with Golden West Airlines failed. What the notes don’t mention is that they had two bad crashes almost back to back (May 22, 1968 and August 14, 1968) that killed a total of 44 people. Which may have been a contributing factor…

Posted in Helicopters, History, Planes, Travel | Comments Closed