Charles Lindbergh

They didn’t call him Lucky Lindy for nothing

Talk about luck.

For more than 30 years Charles Lindbergh’s 1932 Monocoupe D-145 hovered over the Concourse C checkpoint at Lambert-St Louis International Airport (STL).

But just last month, to make way for the relocation of that checkpoint, the plane was lowered to the floor, removed from the airport and put in storage at Missouri’s Mount Vernon Municipal Airport.

According to the owner of the company that moved the plane, “Had it still been inside the St. Louis airport when the tornado blew through last Friday, the plane would have taken a direct hit.”

Lucky, right?

That’s what the folks at the Missouri Historical Society are probably thinking. The organization received the plane from Lindbergh back in 1940 and planned to have it restored and put on display at the Mount Vernon Airport while renovations were underway at Lambert.

The timeline for restoring and returning the plane to Lambert airport may be altered a bit by the aftermath of the tornado, but at least the plane is safe and still around.

Tornado closes Lambert-St. Louis Airport indefinitely

We’ll be getting more details today, but Friday night, April 22nd, an apparent tornado ripped through the St. Louis area and caused so much damage at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport that the airport is now closed indefinitely while they figure out what to do.

Here’s a story from the local TV news station KMOV:

 

Airport spokespeople say at least four people were transported to area hospitals with minor injuries and that:

“At this time, it appears that Terminal 1 and Concourse C suffered the most damage from the storm with high winds that blew out up to 50 percent of windows and caused roof damage as well.  There is also considerable storm damage at the entrances of the airport and along roadways.”

KMOV has also posted a gallery of photos showing what the area looked like after the tornado:

See the rest of the KMOV STL airport tornado damage photo gallery.

The damage is heartbreaking. Especially for those who have been looking forward to all the new features and amenities that were being put in place for a major restoration project.

Let’s hope the Lindbergh 1934 Monocoupe D-145 is safe. Charles Lindbergh’s personal plane hovered over the STL Concourse C checkpoint for 30 years and just last month was lowered and moved to the Mt. Vernon Municipal Airport to make way for a concourse relocation project. The plane is owned by the Missouri History Museum and is scheduled to return to STL when renovations there are complete.

Daylight Saving Time: where to watch the clock

Clock turn back time

(Boston: courtesy Marriott’s Custom House)

Daylight Saving Time (DST) ends at 2 a.m. Sunday morning when we “fall back” to standard time by turning our clocks back one hour.

As you rush around resetting the clocks on the microwave, the TV and the bedside alarm, imagine yourself watching time fly in one of the clock-worthy cities I included in the slide-show-style story I put together for msnbc.com this week: How time flies! Where to see the world’s clocks.

Grand Central Terminal clock

(Courtesy Metro-North Railroad)

The story includes the information booth clock at New York City’s Grand Central Station, clock and watch museums in Pennsylvania and Connecticut, what may be the oldest continually running town clock (in Winnsboro, South Carolina), and the Bily Clocks Museum in Spillville, Iowa, which is home to 43 intricately carved clocks, some more than ten feet tall, made by Joseph and Frank Bily over the course of 45 years.

Dvorak clock Bily Brothers

The Bily Brothers’ clocks have themes ranging from art and religion to history and culture. The collection includes an American Pioneer History Clock, an Apostle Clock, a violin-shaped clock honoring Czech composer Antonin Dvorkak (above) and an airplane-shaped clock (below) made to commemorate Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight. (That propeller moves!)

Lindbergh Bily Clocks Museum

(Courtesy: Bily Clocks Museum)

In researching the story, I also came upon this film documenting the incredible video mapping project done to mark the 600th anniversary of Prague’s astronomical clock in Old Town Square.

Museum Monday: Looking for Lindbergh

There are more than 700 aviation and space-related museums in this country.

Each Monday we profile one of them. Eventually we’ll hit them all.

This week: Looking for Lindbergh

Charles Linbergh

Aviator and explorer Charles Lindbergh died on August 26th back in 1974, so it’s as good a time as any to take a look at some of the museums around the country that display items relating to Lucky Lindy.

First stop: The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., which displays Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis airplane in the Milestones of Flight Gallery.

(Photo by Eric Long/NASM, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution)

Next stop: The Missouri History Museum, which has an ongoing exhibition dedicated to Charles Lindbergh’s life. The exhibit includes some of the medals and gifts that Lindbergh loaned to the Missouri Historical Society for ten days back in 1927, shortly after the famed aviator completed the first solo, transatlantic flight.

Lindbergh, Missouri History Museum

Crocheted, stuffed airplane made for Charles Lindbergh

“The Missouri Historical Society exhibited the items on top of the archaeological cases in an attempt to display the items as quickly as possible. The exhibition opened on June 25, 1927, and a local newspaper estimated that 116,000 people viewed the Lindbergh items during the first four days of the exhibition. The exhibition’s popularity led to Lindbergh agreeing to extend the loan of the collection; five years later, Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, donated the extensive collection to the Missouri Historical Society.”

There are plenty of other museums around the country that display a community’s link to Lindbergh, but for today our final stop will be the Stanley King Collection of rare Charles Lindbergh commemorative memorabilia at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center down the road from Washington Dulles International Airport.

Stanley King Lindbergh collection

(Photo by Eric Long/NASM, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution)

Do you have a favorite aviation or space-related museum you’d like others to know about? If you do, please write a note about it below and it may be featured on a future edition of Museum Monday here on StuckatTheAirport.com

Bonus features on Oakland Int’l Airport website

Poke around on some airport websites and you’ll find some fun, surprising and educational stuff.

Case in point: the Oakland International Airport (OAK) site, which has a link to the Exploratorium’s instructions on how to fold a paper airplane, information about the Oakland Aviation Museum, which sits on the airport’s North Field,

and a great historical video about the history of the airport and its connections to Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart and other aviation pioneers.

You can watch the entire 20-minute video, or see bite-size segments of the film on the OAK website.