News & Comments
AAHS BUILDING MOVE UPDATE
Activity is underway for the American Aviation Historical Society’s move to Flabob Airport (KRIR), in Riverside, Calif., from Orange County, California. We’re moving into the building formerly occupied by the Flabob Airport management team, conveniently located right at the entrance of the airport.
The new’ office building is a 70-year old barracks building, constructed for ‘temporary’ use on a nearby airfield during WWII. It has had renovations over the years to remove the asbestos, install additional electrical outlets, etc. However, the needs of AAHS’ extensive photo collection and research library space necessitates the update of the floor plan of the building. Below is a ‘to-be’ floorplan of the new headquarters space. The largest change is the development of a “photo vault,” a room with additional fire-proofing and floor reinforcements, designed to house the extensive photo collection, and the heavy, fire-proof safes that many of them are stored in.
As of early December, we have begun demolition of the interior area, in preparation for the floor reinforcements. Plans and permits have been submitted to the city, and have passed all permit requirements, save the fire code, which is still in process.
We plan to have the interior updated and move-in ready in January 2019, and move a portion of our reference library in first. The photo archive will remain at our Huntington Beach office for the time being, where volunteers are busy digitizing and identifying the slide collection. We will occupy the Huntington Beach office for at least two additional years to continue the photo digitization effort, thanks to the generosity of AAHS member Tim Williams, who has donated funds for this purpose.
AAHS member John Turgyan has been a tremendous support in donating the funds for the current building construction. Next year we will be working to allocate further resources to install additional book storage areas using large seavan containers. This will let us keep some ‘free room’ inside our building for needed research and meeting room space.
AAHS is already looking to partner with Flabob Airport on upcoming events, such as their celebration of the 40th anniversary of the first manned solar-powered airplane flight, at Flabob in April of 1979. We look forward to holding events ourselves and supporting historic events such as these in our new building, with our new partners at Flabob!
More than a Pilot: The Life and Career of a True Aviation Pioneer: Robert N. Buck; Vol 63, No. 2, Summer 2018
A number of you caught a typographic error in this story for which we apologize to both our readers and author. We’re not sure how the error occurred, nor why none of our excellent . . .