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Lough Erne was a base for RAF Coastal Command flying boats protecting Allied shipping convoys in the Atlantic.

Later it became the world's largest military flying boat station during World War Two.

“President Franklin D. Roosevelt traveled by Boeing Clipper to meet with Winston Churchill at the Casablanca Conference in 1943. On the way home, Roosevelt celebrated his birthday in the flying boat’s dining room.”

“I heard a rumbling sound and saw a flying boat, as Thais called it back then,” recalled an animated Mr. Sao, now 87.

Here, after World War II, the quixotic — all right, yes, and the downright weird — aviator/producer/industrialist Howard Hughes built the enormous wooden flying boat that just about everyone but Hughes called the Spruce Goose.