Live Long and Do the Batusi

Carpe That Diem

The WFC at Piseco Airport for their annual pancake breakfast.

August 24th was a full day of varied adventure. Alyssa, Kristy, and I departed the Williamson Sodus Airport in Warrior 481 along with three other airplanes flown by WFC members. We landed on a nearly 12,000 foot long runway once approved as an alternate space shuttle landing site, descended among the Adirondack Mountains in search of pancakes (and found them!), took turns posing in the captain's chair on the bridge of the USS Enterprise, and had an unexpected encounter with another iconic 1960s vehicle. 

General aviation really does impart super powers.

Fuel Stop at Griffiss

Date	Aircraft	Route of Flight	Time (hrs)	Total (hrs)
24 Aug 2024	N21481	SDC (Sodus, NY) - RME (Rome, NY) - K09 (Piseco, NY) - 4B6 (Ticonderoga, NY) - SDC	4.5	2899.7

Tom and I both needed fuel and, at $4.42/gal, Griffiss International in Rome had the best avgas deal going in all of Upstate NY. Being practically on the way to the fly-in breakfast in Piseco we planned to attend that morning made it a necessary stop.

Kristy, it's not a military airport any more. You don't have to salute!

A former Air Force Base and designated alternate landing site for NASA's space shuttle program, Griffiss is now a quiet towered general aviation airport that pairs a massive 11,820 x 200 foot runway with inexpensive self service fuel. Griffiss' vast runway remains the longest that I have ever landed on.

Tom and Alicia taxi for departure.

It is almost always a quick turn at Griffiss. Intersection departures near the fuel farm ramp are commonly offered and reasonable to accept considering the excessive length of the runway.

All in the Timing

Every August, the Speculator Lions Club hosts a pancake breakfast at Piseco Airport (K09) in the southern Adirondack Mountains. Because the field does not have weather reporting and is prone to fog on cool mornings, flying to breakfast at Piseco involves a leap of faith. True to form, we heard commentary about fog at Piseco on the radio while inbound to Griffiss. Fortunately, the fuel stop delayed our arrival enough that the fog cleared before we descended into the Adirondack valley surrounding the airport. After landing, volunteers efficiently marshaled us to parking on the crowded ramp.

We arrived in four aircraft: Kristy, Alyssa, and me in Warrior 481; Tom and Alicia in Two Six Romeo; Eric and Mike in Eight Five X-Ray, and Scott and Kim in Warrior Eight One Six.

Eric, Kristy, and Mike waiting in line for breakfast.

I enjoy Piseco’s pancake breakfasts. It is a beautiful spot, the events are always well managed, and the food is delicious. As an added bonus in 2024, breakfast was free to all pilots in command who flew in.

Alyssa, Alicia, and Tom were reunited for the first time since Mackinac.

I think it may have been the first fly-in pancake breakfast for student pilots Alyssa and Eric. After an excellent breakfast, we had plenty of time to roam the ramp and check out all the airplanes that flew in. We learned that 50 aircraft flew in that morning. This is impressive considering that the Williamson Flying Club only gets about 30 airplanes flying in each year for our breakfast despite being more centrally located. We make up for it with street traffic, however.

WFC club aircraft Eight Five X-Ray.

A 1946 Cessna 140 (foreground) and a 1966 Cessna 150 (airborne).

A PA-18 Super Cub. How much fun would this be? 

A 1946 Piper PA-12 Super Cruiser.

Tom's Cherokee 180 (center) and WFC club aircraft Warrior Eight One Six (right).

Tom's 1969 PA-28-180 Cherokee and a familiar looking wingtip.

A 1951 Piper PA-22 Tri-Pacer parked next to Warrior 481 on the "twins only" tie down spot.

At least I had a prominent parking spot right up front.

Lake Amphibians make a lot of noise under takeoff power and this one's departure captured everyone's attention.

This is my favorite picture of the day. Just look at all those smiling faces! From left to right are Kristy, me, Alicia, Eric, Tom, Alyssa, Mike, Kim, and Scott. Sadly, it was here that we split from Tom and Alicia who were bound for Maine rather than Ticonderoga, NY with the rest of us.

Dreams of a Retro Future

There is a crazy man who lives in Ticonderoga. I say this with all the respect and admiration I can muster because, in addition to being crazy, he is also meticulously detail oriented and dedicated to his passions. Put bluntly, James Cawley is a Star Trek super fan, a Trekkie's Trekkie. At the age of 17, he reached out to Star Trek original series costume designer Bill Theiss for advice on making an authentic Captain Kirk uniform. Theiss was notoriously associated with the "Theiss Titillation Theory" that established a proportionality between the sexiness of a costume and its apparent risk of wardrobe malfunction. Blatant examples of this idea are exemplified by the precariously skimpy and censor defying costumes featured in 1960s Trek. At the time Cawley contacted him, Theiss was serving as costume designer for the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and he hired Cawley as an intern for the costume department. After that first season, both Theiss and Cawley left Star Trek, with Cawley going on to become a successful Elvis impersonator. (You can't make this stuff up, folks.)

After Theiss passed away in 1992, Cawley received packages containing complete blueprints for the Star Trek original series and Next Generation sets. Funded by earnings from portraying Elvis, Cawley embarked on a multiyear journey to recreate the original series set with exacting precision, supplementing the blueprints with hours of carefully examined series footage to dress the sets appropriately. Created within a former Saveway market in downtown Ticonderoga, NY, the original series set opened to the public in 2016. 

It is so well executed that it is recognized as an official CBS property and a lengthy list of Star Trek actors from the original series and beyond have journeyed to Ticonderoga for a visit: William Shatner, George Takei, Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, Gates McFadden, Karl Urban, Anson Mount, Levar Burton, Brent Spiner, John de Lancie, and Jonathan Frakes -- just to name a few. Instagram photos of Star Trek cast members grinning ear to ear on Cawley's recreated set are such a delight to peruse. Shatner has been known to visit multiple times a year and regularly conducts Q&A sessions on the bridge while comfortably seated in an exact replica of Captain Kirk's chair. During another event, a screening of The Trouble with Tribbles took place on the Enterprise bridge while author David Gerrold provided live commentary from the captain's chair.

There is indeed a crazy man who lives in Ticonderoga and he has created the most wonderfully magical place. I cannot think of a grander expression of love for the franchise than what Cawley has achieved. This was my second visit to the Star Trek Original Series Set Tour. Despite it being my second trip, I still experienced a sense of childlike giddiness in being surrounded by the familiar starship Enterprise. It was as though I'd crawled through my TV screen as a kid and found myself on the other side.

Aboard the USS Enterprise

I took a more comprehensive set of photographs during our visit in 2021 and will only show a few examples of the set interior in this post. My primary goal in returning was for Kristy to have the experience because she was not available when The Bear and I visited previously. This time around, The Bear was with her cross country team on a retreat in the Adirondack Mountains and was very disappointed that she could not join us.

Since our last visit, the museum had upped their tribble storage game. Instead of the generic crate where The Bear found her tribble in 2021, these tribbles were in barrels marked for Sherman's Planet, the intended destination of all that grain eaten by tribbles in The Trouble with Tribbles episode. Nice touch!

First stop, transporter room. Our tour guide explained that most of the cost of Star Trek came from the addition of special effect post production. Adding in the Alka-Seltzer enhanced transporter effect was one example of the meticulous work required after filming to complete each episode.

Photo by Mike.

Two to beam down to Risa! 

"Bright light! Bright light!" Whatever you do, do not look straight down at the transporter pad!

All corridor scenes were filmed in the same corridor because they only built one. Standing here, we could be anywhere on the Enterprise. My biggest surprise about the Star Trek Original Series Set Tour was that the set was contiguous. All rooms, from the transporter room to sick bay to engineering, are all attached to the same corridor. The experience is truly immersive.

Kristy brought out her "this is so cool" face! It really is a magical place.

Sick Bay.

This black and red device in sick bay was originally a clock-radio that was augmented with extra buttons and given a new paint job. Cawley studied original series footage and located surviving examples of the same model clock radios to alter exactly as Star Trek's prop department would have.

Blue borders around video screens were used as a guide for post production staff to excise the original plain background and insert images being viewed by the characters, usually talking heads. This exacting work would have been performed frame by frame with the inserted footage precisely positioned in each case to ensure that the resulting image was stable.

From Theiss, Cawley received a swatch of this sick bay fabric. This material is no longer manufactured, so Cawley had the fabric on these beds custom made based on the authentic swatch received from his former mentor. This is what makes the Star Trek Original Series Set Tour so immersive. Attention to detail is so high that it is almost as if Cawley reached back in time, rescued the original Desilu sets from destruction, and reassembled them for our enjoyment in the 21st century.

As the musicians in our group, Kristy and Eric immediately recognized those trombone mutes for what they were. The display of ancient medical implements was only used in one episode, Space Seed, because the script required that Khan have access to a weapon.

Tour guides emphasize that the ambient sounds we hear during episodes are added in post production, the actors never heard them while filming on set. In 2021, we learned that this communication panel (above) was wired to play the distinctive original series red alert claxon. No one told William Shatner, who was fond of dramatically punching the red alert button during set walkthroughs on his visits to Ticonderoga. Evidently, the actor received quite a surprise when an authentic alert siren blared back at him!

A future Federation medical textbook sketch of the Denebian slime devil, a creature first invoked during The Trouble with Tribbles as a Klingon insult. 

Sick bay laboratory.

We discovered a crewman chilling in the sick bay decompression chamber.

"His pattern indicates two dimensional thinking."

Peering up the prototype Jefferies tube.

To my surprise, we were led into a room that was not finished on our last visit, Auxiliary Control. This room served as an emergency control center for the Enterprise and also doubled as a bridge for other starships.

We wrapped up our "trek" through the contiguous part of the set by staring down the throat of the warp core in engineering.

Beep. Boop.

Rhetorical question: how many fights took place on that ladder? I suspect that it was installed specifically for action sequences.

From engineering, we exited through a discrete corner of the set and walked an inclined hallway to reach the only room on set that is non-contiguous with everything else. It is arguably the most important location of all.

We stepped onto the iconic bridge of the USS Enterprise. 

Kristy got her time in the chair and looked very much at home.

I, of course, am no stranger to the chair. It was good to be back. I think we missed an opportunity here by not getting a group photo of WFC president Scott in the chair with the rest of us around him.

Scott, Kim, and Kristy depart the bridge of the Enterprise.

One last wide-angle view before exiting.

As we finished the tour, I asked our guide what was next for Cawley’s team. She explained that they had obtained the original Galileo shuttlecraft and restored it. Their current challenge is locating a place to display it as the current set essentially fills the existing building. An ongoing effort to build Next Generation set pieces is similarly space limited, which explained the holodeck arch incongruously standing in the main lobby otherwise dedicated to the 1960s Enterprise.

BATMAN!

(Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na...etc.)

While Auxiliary Control was a surprise, an even bigger surprise waited in the parking lot: James Cawley's meticulously-crafted replica 1966 Batmobile! Alyssa bought a ticket to ride ("and she don't care!") in the Batmobile and her driver was James Cawley himself! At 19 feet long, the Batmobile is a handful and Cawley is the only one who drives it.

Cawley settles Alyssa in the Batmobile.

As they pulled out of the parking lot, Cawley cranked up the radio to play the Batman TV series theme song. "BATMAN! BATMAN!" 

After their return, Cawley spent some time with us answering questions about his creation. The original 1966 Batmobile was created by George Barris from a one of a kind 1955 Lincoln Futura concept car. The dual windshields of the Batmobile are carried over directly from the Futura design, but the front grille bat face was all Barris. Cawley said that the main challenge in creating another Batmobile is that there are no other Futura concept cars available. Instead, he needed a car with the proper wheel base, which limited him to a Lincoln Continental from 1956 or 1957.

Cawley explained that the red beacon on top of the cockpit arch was an actual Batmobile beacon used on screen for filming that he obtained from his contacts in the industry. He went on to describe how possessing the correct beacon allowed him to properly scale the curvature of the arch based on proportions measured from old photographs.

For me, actually meeting Cawley was one of the best parts about our visit. His enthusiasm for his craft and his dedication to accuracy were evident in even a brief conversation. He is a capable speaker and clearly loves sharing details of his recreations with museum visitors. I may refer to him as crazy, but I intend that in the most respectful way. I admire his ability to transform dreams into tangible reality.

I wonder if Bruce Wayne approved those custom painted valve covers?

The Waiting Is the Hardest Part

While it was a great day, the one low point was an excessive wait for taxi transportation back to the airport. Over an hour into the wait, Alyssa, Eric, Mike, and I realized that our pancakes from Piseco had expired, so we walked across the street to get slices from the House of Pizza. Enthusiasm for Star Trek clearly spills over into the town of Ticonderoga and inside the pizza place we found autographed pictures of various Star Trek actors who once visited, including Klingons portrayed by J.G. Hertzler (Martok) and Robert O'Reilly (Gowron). Considering that they visited in full Klingon regalia and makeup, I wondered if these guys actually ate pizza in character because that would have been a sight to see!

As we devoured our slices and groused about the delayed taxi, it was Alyssa who had the best idea of the afternoon. "Why don't we order a pizza for delivery to the airport and ask them to deliver us along with it?" This is the kind of out of the box thinking that the world needs.

Alyssa, Kristy, and me flying home from Ticonderoga.

Eventually, the taxi arrived and transported us back to the airport in two groups. With a 15 knot headwind, we were airborne 1.8 hours for the return to Sodus. It was an eclectic day filled with great friends, beautiful vistas, pancakes and airplanes, mountains, an iconic starship built by an Elvis impersonator, and the coolest car from one of the kitschiest TV shows ever made. Really, it was all just another day in the life of a private pilot.