The Grumman Goose was one of the most versatile amphibious aircraft ever produced. It was used in both wartime and peace time, and had multiple iterations of style and construction, including an experimental VTOL model and a turbo-prop model. The plane was originally designed for use in the Long Island area, but rapidly became the commuter plane of choice in places like Southeast Alaska and in the Caribbean, where ground landings were not always available. I have fond memories of them parked at the docks in Juneau when I was a child.
The China Clipper, a Martin M-130, never flew to China. It was the first commercial flight across the Pacific, to Manila, and had to be amphibious because in 1935, there were no terrestrial landing stips that could accommodat the plane on fuel stops. At the time, it was a domestic flight, because the Philippines were then US territory.
Only 3 Martin M-130s were ever built, the China Clipper, the Philippine Clipper, and the Hawaii Clipper. Martin built a fourth flying boat, the M-156 Russian Clipper, that was similar to but larger than the M-130.
The Hawaii Clipper disappeared over the Pacific in 1938. The Philippine Clipper survived the Japanese attack on Wake Island after their attack on Pearl Harbor, but crashed in 1943 in California on a return from Hawaii. The last, the China Clipper, broke up and sank on landing at Trinidad and Tobago in 1945.
The Monkees vocal-only rap-style song “Zilch” includes the line “China Clipper calling Alameda” - a radio call included in a dramatic scene in the film “China Clipper”, starring Humphrey Bogart. Pan Am’s transpacific services left from the Naval Air Station at Alameda, across the bay from San Francisco, and later the site of some of the Mythbusters’ best experiments.
Pan American World Airways, known from its founding until 1950 as Pan American Airways and commonly known as Pan Am, was the principal and largest international air carrier in the United States from 1927 until its collapse on December 4, 1991.
During Pan Am’s heyday in the 1960s, there were strict requirements for stewardesses: They had to be at least 5-foot-2, weigh no more than 130 pounds, and retire by age 32. They couldn’t be married or have children, either. As a result, most women averaged just 18 months on the job.
Pan Am announced on Christmas Eve 1968 that the airline intended to offer commercial flights to the Moon. A waiting list for the First Moon Flights Club grew to 93,000 members over the next twenty years. Even now, however, no such flights have yet been offered.
Scottish auth0or J.M. Barrie created the Peter Pan character based on his older brother, David, who died in an ice-skating accident the day before his 14th birthday. His mother and brother thought of him as forever a boy. Barrie first used Peter Pan as a character in a section of The Little White Bird (1902), an adult novel where he appears as a seven-day-old baby.
Barrie, Ontario, around 50 miles north of Toronto, was the final destination for one branch of the Underground Railroad in the 1850s.
By average discharge, the largest river in North America is the St. Lawrence, which runs from Lake Ontario to the Atlantic Ocean.
The longest mountain range in the world is under water. Called the Mid-Oceanic Ridge, this chain of mountains runs through the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and into the Indian and Pacific oceans. It runs more than 35,000 miles long, has peaks higher than those in the Alps and it comprises 23 percent of the Earth’s total surface.
The ‘opposite’, in one sense of the word, of an oceanic ridge is an oceanic trench. Oceanic ridges and trenches are found at the edges of continental plates (of plate tectonics). As an underwater plate drifts, its trailing edge forms a ridge as new magma rises and fills the gap formed along the edge of the departing plate. This new magma creates the newest part of that continental plate. The leading edge of an underwater plate forms a trench by the subduction of that plate edge.
The Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980 is a result of the tectonic action in the Cascadia subduction zone. That fault in that zone stretches for over 1000 km.
A lahar is a volcanic mudflow. On 18 May 1980, lahars from the Mt. St. Helens eruption filled rivers with rocks, sand, and mud, damaged 27 bridges and 200 homes and forced 31 ships to remain in ports upstream.
After the eruption, among the first animals to return to the Mt. St. Helens area were in late May 1980 when wind-dispersed spiders and scavenging beetles returned.
Some think that an Indonesian volcano super-eruption in 535 A.D., possibly of Krakatoa, set in motion a series of events, beginning with a worldwide outbreak of bubonic plague, which provoked several migrations and invasions and increased the Darkness of the Dark Ages.
The digital dark age is a possible future situation where it will be difficult or impossible to read historical electronic documents and multimedia, because they have been recorded in an obsolete and obscure file format. The name derives from the term Dark Ages in the sense that there would be a relative lack of written record, as documents are transferred to digital formats and original copies lost.
The Targaryen kings of Westeros recorded in the Game of Thrones books of George R.R. Martin tended to marry their relatives and were sometimes polygamous, following the example of the first of their line, Aegon the Conqueror, who married his two sisters.
In ancient Hawaii, the practice of marriage between siblings in the royal family was considered a way of keeping the bloodlines pure.
Hawaii is the most isolated population center on earth: 2,390 miles from California, 3,850 miles from Japan, 4,900 miles from China, and 5,280 miles from the Philippines.
The isolated population center of Honolulu is closer to Alaska than to California.