Restored Connie Finds A Home At JFK

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Over the weekend, drivers along Route I-495 in the Northeast got to see a vintage Constellation Starliner, freshly decked out in 1950s-era TWA livery, riding down the freeway on a flatbed. The fuselage and the detached wings and engines filled two oversize trucks, and attracted news coverage when the convoy stopped to fix a flat tire. The Connie had been restored in Auburn, Maine, after being acquired by Lufthansa as a source of spare parts for its project to restore another Connie to flying condition (that project was cancelled in March, according to ConnieSurvivors.com, and the aircraft is now being disassembled for shipment to Germany). The TWA aircraft will be fitted out as a cocktail lounge adjacent to Terminal 5 at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York.

Visitors to the lounge will be able to tour the restored cockpit and relive the past. “You’re going to feel like you walked into 1962 when flying was really special,” Tyler Morse, developer of the TWA Hotel project, told the Sun Journal of Maine. “We’re going to have the flight attendants with the pillbox hats, the whole nine yards. You’re going to be able to sit in the cockpit, pull on the yoke, push the throttle, just like you did back in the day.” The lounge will seat 110 people.

In Auburn

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