Another great report. The relative isolation of that nav tower is likely its salvation--bad guys are reliably lazy.
I love early aviation lore. My wife's maternal grandfather was a pioneering pilot. He learned to fly so long ago that his first flight training was in the Army Signal Corps as a balloonist. After WWI he barnstormed, flew lots of mail in the West, and became an early multi-engined jockey for the predecessor of TWA, which was TAT. Flying over the Rockies was not done with passengers back when he started, so the "airline" would fly to New Mexico and transfer westbound passengers to rail services to complete their transcontinental trip. Thus TAT became known derisively as "Take A Train". He crashed and crash-landed many times and surely flew the beacon lines more than a few times. Captain Fleet was well beyond combat service age in 1941 but volunteered to ferry aircraft all over the Lower 48 and late in the war flew VIPs on trans-Atlantic trips hopping from Ireland to Iceland and on down through Canada to the US. He retired in the early 1960s after flying Constellations over the pole from San Francisco to London as his regular TWA route for years.
Foy
