The folks at AASHTO, the American Assoc. of State Highway and Transportation Officials, remind us that on June 23, 1931, aviation pioneer Wiley Post and navigator Harold Gatty set out on a record-breaking flight.Traveling in Post’s single-engine monoplane, nicknamed Winnie Mae in honor of Post’s daughter, the daring duo left Roosevelt Field in New York and made a 15,474-mile trip around the world. They made 14 stops and ended up back in New York eight days and 16 hours later, setting a world record for air travel.

That record didn’t stand for long, though. In July, 1933 Post made a solo trip around the world in seven days and 19 hours.

Not content with just flying around this world, Post was thinking about supersonic transport and space travel. So in 1934, he designed a “Man from Mars” high-altitude pressure suit and tested it in an unofficial ascent to 49,000 feet.

Sadly, Post never did get to test his space suit on Mars. He died in an airplane takeoff crash with his friend Will Rogers near Point Barrow, Alaska, on August 15, 1935.

You’d think snow – even a spring snowstorm – wouldn’t get much attention in Alaska. But last Friday the folks in Anchorage got hit with enough snow to set a record for the day and for the month.

According to the National Weather Service, which has an office near the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, 17.2 inches of snow fell in Anchorage and 22 inches of snow fell in northeast Anchorage on Friday and Saturday.

In any “normal” city, that amount of snow would shut down the airport.

Not in Anchorage.

In fact snow has never shut down the airport.

Ever.

And that’s probably why the airport sent out a press release reminding the world that the airport is a four-time recipient of the Balchen/Post award for excellence in the performance of airport snow and ice control.

It looks like its curtains after all for Berlin’s historic Tempelhof International Airport.

According to news reports, airport supporters failed to get enough people to vote this past weekend to keep the airport open. There wasn’t even enough turn-out to have the vote be considered valid.

Tempelholf Airport played a crucial role in the one of the biggest humanitarian air relief missions in history: the Berlin Airlift during the Cold War. The facility is Germany’s oldest commercial airport and is said to be the world’s third largest building, behind the Pentagon and Ceausescu’s palace in Bucharest.

Tempelhof Airport Interior
Photo credit: Florida Center for Instructional Technology