Travel Hydro Power Trip Video Duration – 4.00 minutes. Stars and Stripes Air Tours Hoover Dam Las Vegas, USA Travel Video 72 hours - Adventure Lorraine, Bruce Needham, Stars and Stripes Air Tours. You’re welcome. Thank you for having me. Our pleasure Where are we starting out today here? This is our maintenance facility, our main maintenance thing for Stars and Stripes Air Tours, this is where we do all the maintenance, keep the aircraft fine-tuned, ready to go during the day. You know, I’ve never been up in a helicopter before. Well it going to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for you. I am a little nervous. Yeah? It is going to be ok though, right? People always get nervous before they get in and once they get in, it is… it all goes away. So where are we off to, today? We’re going to Hoover Dam, today. Hoover Dam, Las Vegas How many people can you fit in there? We put six people, and plus the pilot, so we have a total of seven people on board. Over the years, they have kind of; they’ve kinda designed this one for tourism. It’s got great visibility out in the front; they’ve widened it out a bit. Gives it more comfort, out in the front and in the side, for everybody. Oh I love it! It’s the smoothest thing in the world. Smoothest thing in the world! A lot of people think that, they think it’s going to be that old stuff, it’s going to be real bouncy and real noisy and all those fears disappear. You know, you get the sensation of running down the runway, like you do on an airplane. Oh that’s really nice. Well it sets you back into your seat. Speaking of breathtaking, look at this! This is Lake Mead coming up right in front of us right now. Now this is the result of building the dam right in the middle of Colorado River, backing this up – created Lake Mead. Now you can see Hoover Dam, it’ll be coming up over here right in front, that was built between 1931- 35, at a cost of 49 million dollars. Here’s the dam coming up into view right now - it is 726 feet high, that’s about 221 meters, 660 feet right wide down at the bottom and about 45 feet wide across at the top. You know they poured concrete into that thing 24-hours a day for about 18 months. . Can you imagine? Unbelievable, Back in the 30’s, the construction and the engineering that went on in there, it is amazing….. There you can see the bridge that they are building right there, that they have got the arch, they’ve finally met there on the middle of the arch, now, they’ve just got to build the road link over the top. So from the top, it is nice to see it from that perspective right now, because you can see all the guide wires and now when the road gets built across the top, all the guide wires go away so it’s going to be a nice real clean bridge. Umhm—that’s like a dream to see, you got to see it… You got see it in its day? Yeah? There you can see, look down the...see, what is it? Storage there? Look on your right there. The water level comes up, they open the valves and it goes down …. These cruise at about 125 miles a hour. You know, a lot of these can do more, they just feel like there is no movement and the closer you get to the ground and so you pick up the sensation of speed. Oh right now, we’re probably doing 115 miles an hour. Oh you’re kidding me Right This doesn’t feel like it at all Exactly I get it. It feels like nothing at all... It feels smooth as can be. That was nothing like landing an airplane. I felt nothing; it was like a bird landing on a branch. Superior piloting techniques at work here. Of course it is. I have to tell you Bruce, I’m so glad. Thank you for taking me out. It was my pleasure. It’d be my pleasure to take you out anytime you’d like to come flying. I hope so. Thanks again. My pleasure!