A visit to the TWA Museum today at the airline's former corporate headquarters at Charles B. Wheeler Airport just outside of downtown Kansas City, Missouri.
The propeller of a Ford Trimotor flown by Charles Lindbergh to promote TWA in its early days in Kansas City.
A wicker chair that served as a First Class seat in a TWA Ford Trimotor. This particular chair was sat in by Amelia Earhart, hired to promote the airline to women.
A Lockheed Model 10 Electra, dating from the 1930s, in the working hanger attached to the TWA Museum in Kansas City. The plane is airworthy. The second window from the right, above the plane, was Howard Hughes' office when he ran TWA.
The eccentric oil and Hollywood film tycoon Howard Hughes, himself a record-setting aviator, bought a controlling stake in TWA after World War II and transformed it into an international airline. He is portrayed here (bottom right) in a promotional poster.
As I mentioned, the TWA museum is located in the airline's former corporate HQ. The room here, just off the hangar, was used to train new TWA pilots.
This machine on the wall allowed TWA instructors to give pilots and flight attendants pop quizzes on safety and other procedures. If you press the correct answer, the green light turns on; the wrong one, the red one does.
The rooms contain several simulators and mock-ups once used to train TWA pilots and flight attendants.
This isn't the interior of a real airliner. It's the mock-up used by TWA to train flight attendants in both servicing passengers and responding to emergencies.
The recreation of a first class lounge at the TWA Museum in Kansas City. The museum has plans - postponed by COVID - to offer "Flight to Nowhere" evenings that include a reception here followed by a dinner served onboard the cabin mock-up by former flight attendants.
On the other side of the airport runway in Kansas City stands another hangar, home to a second museum, the Airline History Museum.
It may look kind of sketchy on the outside, as you walk under the tail and wing of an abandoned L-1011.
Check out the TWA Super Constellation - the majestic pinnacle of propeller-driven airliners just before the arrival of the jet age.
Inside the Super Constellation:
And right next to it, the legendary DC-3.
Can anyone identify what this early metal single-engine airliner is?
Some more glimpses of the Super Connie.
A large but relevant change of gear: the childhood home of Amelia Earhart, on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River in Atchison, Kansas.
As a young girl, Amelia Earhart was raised by her maternal grandmother, who disapproved of her tomboyish ways. Amelia's room was the large center window over the front door.
The view of the Missouri River across the street from Amelia Earhart's childhood home in Atchison, Kansas. Almost like you are flying.
Atchison was the eastern terminus of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad (now part of BNSF), which helped drive the settlement of Kansas.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I no longer feel like I belong in this country. On a deeply personal level, its values are no longer my values, as they once were. My persistence in it feels increasingly strange and unwelcome.
This is not some angry declaration. The feeling perplexes me, more than anything else.
I say this as someone who served in the military, worked in politics, and spoke proudly and fondly of our country while living abroad.
Well, so it has come to pass. I cannot say I am surprised, because I did see it coming, but it is saddening nonetheless. I will not say much, because I don't trust myself to. But I do think this nation has made a grave mistake. How grave, we shall only learn in time.
This is not the country that I spent a lifetime, at home and abroad, loving and defending. It is something else, and what exactly that means for me I cannot yet say.
I'm cautious about sayihg what I really feel right now, especially on this platform, because I know it would be mocked. And that, itself, is a symptom of what I see, the glee that many now take in other Americans' sadness and fear. We are remaking ourselves in his image.
Then you're a fool. We have a democratic republic. I've been a limited-government conservative Republican my whole life. In fact, some of my major criticisms of Trump are that he is too much a big-government interventionist in the economy.
This inanity about "the US is not a democracy, it's a republic" is getting way too prevalent. The US has a republican form of government - as does China and North Korea. Unlike them, it is democratic in that it derives its authority from the consent of the governed.
"The US is not a democracy, it's a republic" is a line that comes from the old John Birch Society (which was drummed out of the mainstream Republican Party because of its extreme conspiratorial views) based on a very ignorant reading of how the Founders used the term democracy.
If Musk tried to withhold Starlink services to aid a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, our Defense Dept should sit him down and tell him he going to restore it or the U.S. government is appropriating the company in the interests of national security. Full stop.
I’m usually for the U.S. government taking a hands-off approach to business, but we’re talking about a wartime scenario that would almost certainly involve the U.S. in a peer-to-peer conflict and there’d be no room for fooling around.
And quite frankly if he was having conversations with any adversary country about it that would be very problematic in and of itself.
1. There are times when a thread makes so many important mistakes and feeds into so many misconceptions that it's worthwhile to address it point by point. My apologies.
2. It is true that Trump's tariffs against China were ostensibly imposed for the purpose of forcing China to alter it own unfair trade practices - in large part because the President's legal authority to levy special tariffs requires him to cite this as the reason.
3. However, it was unclear from the start what the "ask" was from China - what exactly the Trump Admin wanted China to do that would allow the tariffs to be lifted. And Trump repeatedly talked about tariffs being good and beneficial in their own right.
The reason the bills are “mammoth” is that they includes hundreds, even thousands of legislative changes on a wide variety of unrelated topics. Basically a “bill of bills”.
Where AI could help us by offering some context to what these often small changes actually mean, in terms of policy. Often it’s hard to understand what changing “and” to “or” in Clause 81 of Title II refers to or the impact it could have.