If ever you’re in the Startford/Bridgeport area, DO pop down to the Igor Sikorsky memorial airport and visit ‘The Windsock’ pub and restaurant, just to the east of the old Vought hangars (now used by Atlantic Aviation) on the north side of the airport…they serve a wicked hot chili that made our B-25 driver Larry Kelley sweat and they also have incredibly good CHEAP pizza, as well as any drink you might require and one CUTE bartender who is the daughter of the restaurant owner and is worth about 2 million dollars herself….seems she restores houses and sells them for about $500,000 a piece and has made a good career of it, but still finds time to work behind the bar a few days a week to help out her mother…

Mark

Setter-

Will toss up some more pics when I get a chance….one of the neat things about the area is there is a bay on the back side of the Vought factory and a ramp that leads into the bay…one of the residents there told me a story about how we all focus on the Corsair production as the only thing of consequence that happened there, which just isn’t true…he said that as a kid his father used to take him to that back bay and they would watch these amazing and sometimes enormous Sikorsky flying boats being rolled out of the factory and over to the seaplane ramp and then down into the water where they would test the planes on that little back back, doing power control runs and so forth….and then, when they were deemed seaworthy and ready for a test flight, out the breakwater they would go and onto Long Island sound where they would power up and fly away to be flight tested….and if that all went right, back they would come, landing just outside the back bay and then taxiing back into it and back to the seaplane ramp…..I reckon it musta been quite a thrill to see all of this as a kid! I know I would’ve loved it…

Mark