area before the attraction's opening while fresh water is pumped into storage tanks in the car's underbelly. The original aerial tram cars are now on static display near the entrance to the Valley Station. History The aerial tram was first proposed by electrical engineer Francis F. Crocker during a 1935 trip to Banning, California, with the Desert Sun newspaper publisher Carl Barkow. During the heat of the day, Crocker's gaze fell upon the snow-capped, peak of Mount San Jacinto to the east. Crocker then proposed building an aerial tram up the face of Chino Canyon, an idea that one newspaper dubbed "Crocker's Folly". Toward the end of the decade, Crocker named the comanager of the Palm Springs Desert Inn, O. Earl Coffman, to chair the construction committee. Both World War II and the Korean War shelved the project. Construction began in 1960. The unprecedented use of helicopters in the construction of four of the aerial tram's five towers helped the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway earn a reputation as a great engineering feat. It was opened in September 1963. In 1963, a tram car became stuck for 13½ hours because of an electrical problem in the control room. On September 16, 1967, the first episode of the TV show Mannix was broadcast with the tramway as a scene in the show. On October 2, 1971, an episode of Mission: Impossible (Season 6, Episode 3: "The Tram"), filmed at the tramway, first aired. In the fall of 1966, two episodes of I Spy were filmed in Palm Springs, one of which included footage of the tramway (Season 2, Episode 1), and the other included a brief discussion of the tramway (Season 2, Episode 8). The Columbo episode "Short Fuse" featured the tramway as the location of the climactic scene at the end of the show where Columbo tricks the murderer into revealing his guilt. The fourth and final Matt Helm movie, The Wrecking Crew, contained an action scene filmed at the tram station that featured actors Dean Martin, Nancy Kwan, and Sharon Tate. The 1974 television movie Skyway to Death, shown on the ABC Movie of the Week, had its exterior scenes filmed at the tramway. In the 2010 Life After People episode "Holiday Hell", the desert environment allows the tramway to survive 120 years without maintenance before it collapses into Chino Canyon from corrosion of its cables and towers. In June