My maternal grandparents followed my parents out to California in the early 1950's when my father was hired at United at SFO. They bought a ranch down in Central California in the Santa Ynez area.
My dad's father was deceased and his mother was living with her daughters/ his sister, so he used his United miles to let us go down to Santa Barbara a lot to see the G parents. Hawaii summers but thats another story.
The flight on 440s left SFO, down to Monterey (where we live now), followed Route 68 over to Salinas, then down Route 101 to Paso Robles and out to the coast from there, over the Point at Lompoc and down to Santa Barbara.
Often the pilots would get low and pass San Simeon, the palatial estate of William Hearst.
I've never built that Hawk kit, although it's attractive.
Dad has flown west and I no longer build models for him, but I did build a DC-4 in the early Mainliner scheme and a DC-6 in the later scheme. Both shown in that pic I posted. Schemes, no DC-4 there.
There's a Caravelle in the shed that I would really like to build. He was on the aquisition team for that one after the Electra order was cancelled.
Anyways, back to the Convair airplane. They were noisy and were way before aircraft knew what a loading bridge was.
But I probably have 400 hours or so in them.