"PAAville"

Marshall Islands / Ailinlaplap / Bikeer /
 ruins, place with historical importance
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Drawings indicate that, in addition to the landing dock and shelter, the Pan Am base consisted of about two dozen buildings irregularly spaced within an area of about 26 acres on the central lagoon shoreline of Peale Island. Most of buildings, with the exception of the Pan Am Hotel, were relatively small, rectangular structures, less than 2,000 square feet building area. The Y-shaped hotel was set back from, and oriented toward, the lagoon, on the south side of the Pan Am complex, with the smaller support buildings loosely clustered to the north.

Drawings from 1940 identify the following buildings within the complex: PAA hotel, airport office, crew and personnel quarters, airport managers' quarters, recreation building, domestic quarters, generator
building, gas pump house, shop building, sick bay, warehouse, bunkhouse, and fresh water system structures. The initial PAA directional finder was about 500 feet north of the station, in the center of the island.

lcweb2.loc.gov/pnp/habshaer/um/um0000/um0061/data/um006...
wikitravel.org/en/Image:Wake_Island_map.png
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_Island#American_possession
Nearby cities:
Coordinates:   19°18'28"N   166°37'34"E

Comments

  • This is such an important piece of both aviation, the early Pan Am China Clipper, which had to make multiple landings on its route from Manila to the US; and also military history. Marines were on Wake Island by the summer of 1941 to build military structures in anticipation of an attack from the Japanese. To imagine an airline built these 24 or so structures to accommodate and make facilities for their guests as they stopped over during a very long transpacific flight is almost mindboggling today.
This article was last modified 14 years ago