The Water Park Where You Slide Out of a Real Boeing 747

A retired jumbo jet sits on a rooftop in wine country, and four waterslides run straight through its fuselage.

Landlord Ledger Publications • Profile • 2026-08-23

Drive an hour southwest of Portland into the middle of the Willamette Valley and the skyline of McMinnville, Oregon does something no other skyline in the country does: it puts a full-size Boeing 747 on top of a building, 62 feet in the air, with children in inner tubes disappearing into its rear exit doors and reappearing in a splash pool below. This is Wings & Waves Waterpark, and the jet on the roof is not a replica or a shell. It is a real, once-flying aircraft that logged 58.5 million miles in commercial service before becoming the load-bearing centerpiece of an indoor water park. The story of how it got there, and who has owned the ground underneath it since, is as much a real estate tale as an engineering one.

An Aviation Legacy Looking for a Second Act

Wings & Waves did not appear out of nowhere. It opened on June 6, 2011, as an extension of the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, the McMinnville institution built to house Howard Hughes's massive "Spruce Goose" flying boat. The museum was the creation of Delford M. Smith, founder of cargo carrier Evergreen International Aviation, and it operated for years as the region's flagship draw, pulling in more than 150,000 visitors annually by the museum's own account. The waterpark itself sits within the Captain Michael King Smith Educational Institute, named for Smith's late son, and was conceived from the start as an extension of the museum's teaching mission rather than a standalone amusement business. Inside the 71,350-square-foot facility, that mission takes physical form in the H2O Children's Science Center, an interactive exhibit space built around concepts like Bernoulli's Principle and the water cycle, designed to give the park an educational identity that a typical indoor water park does not carry.

The scale of what was built is not modest. At 71,350 square feet, Wings & Waves bills itself as Oregon's largest waterpark, with ten total slides and a 91,703-gallon wave pool anchoring the space. Four of those slides, named Sonic Boom, Tail Spin, Nose Dive, and Mach 1, all begin inside the aircraft on the roof, engineered by WhiteWater West Industries as a combination of inner-tube and body slides, one of which spirals riders into a "SuperBowl" feature before a final descent into a shutdown lane.

Putting a 747 on a Roof

The aircraft itself is a decommissioned Boeing 747-100 that once flew in Evergreen International Airlines livery. Getting it onto the roof required stripping the engines and much of the interior, which still left roughly 328,000 pounds of airframe to lift 65 feet into the air, along with 28,000 pounds of ballast added to the nose to keep it stable. Contractors used two cranes for the lift, one solely to dampen oscillation in the fuselage as it rose, and relied on one of only seven aircraft slings available anywhere in the world capable of handling a jet that size. Because the plane behaves like a sail once it is mounted, the building's superstructure below had to be engineered to absorb wind loads that an ordinary rooftop installation would never need to withstand. Waterpark officials have called it the first time a 747 has ever been placed on top of a building anywhere in the world, and the design and construction team, led by Counsilman-Hunsaker with contractor Hoffman Construction, built the surrounding 71,000-square-foot structure specifically to carry that load.

A Property That Kept Changing Owners

Where the story turns into a real estate case study is what happened to the ground and buildings underneath the attraction once Evergreen International Aviation's cargo business began to fail. The airline filed for bankruptcy in early 2014, listing as much as $100 million in assets against roughly $500 million in debt, and the fallout reached straight into the museum campus next door. Aircraft from the collection went to auction, and by late 2015 the space museum building and the waterpark itself were headed toward a foreclosure sale. In January 2016, Jackson Family Wines purchased those buildings, only for the museum's own foundation to file for bankruptcy days later in an attempt to block the sale. The property changed hands again in July 2016, when The Falls Event Center, a company controlled by Utah businessman Steve Down, bought the space building and waterpark for $10.9 million. That ownership did not last either. Within about a year, Down came under FBI investigation for fraud, and after a dispute over sold aircraft and unpaid lease payments, the museum sued companies tied to Down before The Falls Event Center itself filed for bankruptcy.

By 2020, the museum had cycled through official bankruptcy status four separate times in five years, and the waterpark's future looked genuinely uncertain. Stability arrived that April when Bill Stoller, founder of Stoller Family Estate winery in nearby Dayton, purchased 285 acres surrounding the museum and waterpark through his Stoller Group, immediately beginning repair and renovation work and leasing the space museum building back to the nonprofit. Stoller has since expanded a 50-acre vineyard across part of the open greenspace on the site and, as of 2025, began construction of a planned 90-room hotel on the property. Ownership of the campus remains split even now: Stoller controls the waterpark, adjacent acreage, and the space museum wing, while the original aviation building housing the Spruce Goose has remained under separate ownership tied to Maine businessman George Schott, whose entity rebranded that side of the campus this past August as the North American Aerospace Museum.

An Attraction Built to Outlast Its Owners

What makes Wings & Waves durable as a business, regardless of who holds title to the land, is that it was designed from the outset to run year-round rather than seasonally. As an indoor facility, it operates as a four-season draw in a region better known for its wine tourism than its water attractions, giving it a visitor base that does not disappear with the weather the way an outdoor park's would. That structural advantage likely explains why, even after four bankruptcies, a fraud investigation, and a lawsuit between the museum and its own neighboring waterpark over unpaid rent, new owners kept finding it worth acquiring rather than letting it close.

The jet on the roof has, in that sense, outlasted every company that has owned the ground beneath it. Evergreen International Aviation is gone. The Falls Event Center is gone. The museum's own foundation has been in and out of bankruptcy court. But the 747 is still there, still bolted into a building engineered specifically to hold it against Willamette Valley wind, still sending riders down through its old rear exit doors and into a pool 65 feet below. In a region where most attractions live or die with a single operator, the aircraft itself has become the one constant asset that every successive owner, wine company and event center and vineyard alike, has ultimately committed to keeping.