The Howard Hughes-piloted Spruce Goose has two extremely famous, often-retold facts about it, and neither is the interesting tidbit that Leonardo DiCaprio flew a fictional version of it, on film at least, in "The Aviator."
Although as exciting scenes go, that one was up there, we can all agree.
Here are those two Goosean facts, which you likely know. 1) The Spruce Goose, less famously called the H-4 Hercules Flying Boat, was the largest plane ever built, and, yeah, it was mostly made of wood, birch to be specific. Amazement. 2) It flew once, near Long Beach, on Nov. 2, 1947.
The Spruce Goose now resides in the state to our north, at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon. But the very expansive, storied place the Goose came together still stands here in town. Playa Vista, to be specific.
Now the LA Conservancy is hosting a day of tours at the Hercules Campus on Sunday, March 20. We said "Hercules Campus" there, which it is indeed called, but back in the day it was HQ for Hughes Aviation.
Storied? Storied.
The short-and-long of it: Tickets'll go. We're talking about this way in advance, because the Hercules Campus does not open often for this sort of thing. So it is definitely an act now sort of event, especially if you're into planes and history, and if you live in LA, you should be enamored of both those things.
A general ticket is $25. And, oh, we said "the short-and-long of it" there, but really, we mean the "very, very long of it," because, of course, we're talking about the making of one unfathomably huge airship.
