HISTORY COMES TO LIFE
This B-17 never saw combat, but that doesn’t stop the war stories
Jim Wojciechowski was drinking coffee on his North Shore deck Monday morning when he heard a terrific roar and looked up to see a silver plane with red-tipped wings soar overhead.
He recognized it immediately: a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, the type of bomber his uncle flew as a tail gunner in World War II. Mr. Wojciechowski hopped in his car and drove to the Allegheny County Airport to see it up close. His uncle, a member of the 91st Bombardment Group, flew 30 missions over France and Germany out of the Royal Air Force Bassingbourn base in England, he said.
“When it got near 20,000 feet, cold smoke came out of the engines and German planes would hide in the streams and try to hit the tail gunner,” Mr. Wojciechowski said, taking in the plane’s gleaming 103-foot wingspan and four engines. “The rest of the crew wouldn’t know if he was dead or alive until the end of the mission.”
For the first time in its history, this B-17, named the “Madras Maiden,” is offering public rides in cities across America, through the Oklahoma-based Liberty Foundation and its crew of volunteer pilots. The plane will be on the ground in West Mifflin all week and available for free ground tours and ticketed half-hour flights this weekend.
The “Madras Maiden” never saw combat; one of the last B-17 models, it was built at the end of WWII and was soon modified to be a “Pathfinder” aircraft, used to develop early radar technology. But the B-17s and the young men who flew in them made sacrifices that ensured “our freedoms and our way of life,” said John Shuttleworth, of the state of Indiana, a Liberty Foundation pilot.
B-17s were operated by the Eighth Air Force as daylight bombers in Europe, although they saw some action in the Pacific Theater, said James Hammons, of Georgia, a Liberty Foundation co-pilot. Of the 12,000 B17s built during the war, nearly 5,000 were lost in combat, he added.
“An airplane like this had to carry a heavy load at a really high altitude for a very long distance and take a lot of punishment going back and forth,” Mr. Hammons said. B-17s were not pressurized; crew members wore heavy heated flight suits, sometimes flying in such low temperatures that their oxygen masks froze to their faces, he added.
On the “Madras Maiden,” passengers can experience the crew’s various positions, from a waist gunner’s machine gun toward the rear of the plane, to the radio operator’s compartment in the middle, to the bombardier’s position in the nose.
But the experience isn’t cheap: 30-minute flights are $450 a seat. Selling rides helps offset the plane’s nearly $6,000-an-hour operating costs, Mr. Shuttleworth said.
The “Madras Maiden” offers more than a chance to see your city from the air, said Mr. Hammons. At every city the plane visits, veterans visit the plane and begin telling stories their families have never heard before, as if seeing the plane in person prompts long-forgotten memories.
“These people will come out here and share their stories, stories that aren’t in books. They’ll bring faded photographs and maps, and it takes them back to a time 70 years ago [when] they were giving up their lives to save us, people who weren’t even born yet,” Mr. Hammons said. “What a sacrifice. They were 19 years old with 300 hours of flight time, flying these airplanes and dying in droves.”
The “Madras Maiden” changed hands several times over the years, in use as a cargo transport and a pesticide sprayer before the Erickson Collection, an aviation museum in Madras, Ore., bought it in 2013. Restored to its combat configuration, the plane was painted in the colors of the 381st Bomb Group, which completed 297 operational missions and dropped over 22,000 tons of bombs during the war.
“It’s a national treasure, so there’s a lot of responsibility with it,” Mr. Shuttleworth said. “Everywhere we go, people are watching.”