Boeing 304 boatplane or planeboat

[con-pilot]

Last week I was in Boca Raton Florida for a Dassault Falcon Jet M and O meeting and docked outside of the hotel in the marina was a fuselage of a Boeing 304 that had been converted into a boat. There was a picture of this boat, er plane or whatever a little while back in Jet Blast in a “Captions” threats.

Anyway, I was invited onboard one night and was able to take some pictures of the interior including the cockpit, er bridge (?) and hopefully I will soon be able to post them here. The guy that owns the boat seems pretty nice, however he is in a bit of a finical bind from what I could determine. His goal is to have the cockpit fully restored and have all the instruments in working condition. The Flight Engineer’s panel is still installed, however none of the instrumentation works mostly due to the fact that there are no longer four engines.

Pictures soon.

[PaperTiger]

Boeing 307 (http://www.crazedfanboy.com/npcr/laflapcr178.html) aka Stratoliner.
The famous "Cosmic Muffin" once owned by Howard Hughes and clobbered by one of Florida's more muscular hurricanes.

[con-pilot]

Oops, right you are. I don't know why I wrote 304, of course it is or was a 307.

Thanks!

[Bof]

Back in 1960, used to flog the Hastings back and forth from Changi to Kai Tak. We often staged through Saigon outbound, as we needed to carry div fuel from Hong Kong to the Phillipines. Invariably we were parked next to a Boeing 307 of Air Laos (I believe they even had two!). Always thought it interesting as it looked smaller than than the HP product we were flying but never bothered to take a pic leave alone have a look inside! I guess I didn't have the same sense of history in those days - too keen on rushing to the fleshpots of HK!