The first plane I got to see turned out to be the TF-51D.

     Some time during the spring semester, Ron, my then-fellow scene shop staffer, called out to me to say that there was going to be a "war bird" tour parking at Purdue's airport come August.  I looked up the web link ('cause this is the age of the internet, say thank ya' - or say sorry, depending on your point of view) and saw that an organization entitled The Collings Foundation had some Second World War planes flying across the United States.  Four on this trip: a TF-51 - Toulouse Nuts (pictured above), a two seat conversion of the famed pursuit aircraft; a B-17 "Flying Fortress" - Nine-0-Nine; a B-24 "Liberator" - Witchcraft, both heavy bombers; and a medium bomber, a B-25 "Mitchell" - Tondelayo. They were scheduled to stop in West Lafayette from a Monday afternoon through a Wednesday morning, and would have not only walk-arounds but walk-throughs of the bombers, plus, for those who were inclined the opportunity to ride along on flights.  

     The B-24 "Liberator" Witchcraft, taking off on Monday afternoon for its half-hour visitors' flight.

    I suppose you could say that I have a "thing" for the B-17.  It is not so much in evidence these days as I have plenty of other things to occupy my attention (the images on this website for instance) but since I was a child the "Flying Fortress" has held a place in my mind.  That one would be coming to the Lafayettes was cause for a smile of delight.  The other airplanes that were flying along with the "Fort" I knew of certainly, had built styrene models of, too, and worthy of appreciation certainly but - well, I wanted to see that one.  Had to see that one.  It had been over 20 years since I had seen one "in person," and to have one in my back yard as the saying goes was not going to be an opportunity passed up.  That I could actually get in was even better.  That I might ride along on a flight?  That was - well, in the spring, I didn't think I would.  It aint cheap to ride along.  You're basically buying a seat for a flight, just like any other flight, except you'll only go up fly around in a circle and land.  Might be a big circle, but it's still a circle.  Still the idea did linger.

     The B-17 "Flying Fortress" Nine-0-Nine  on Monday on its visitors' flight.

     The Monday in August the Wings of Liberty Tour was due in at Noon,  would begin flying visitors after 5 PM, and I parked myself on the top level of a parking garage on campus that had a view over the flight path of Purdue's airport.  I had no idea when after 5 PM the planes would start flying, but I had coffee and a scone, so I was prepared to wait.  As it happened, it was, as noted above, the TF-51 that went roaring overhead first.  Purdue has a whole program in aviation (hence the airport) that covers everything from how the mechanics are designed to actually learning to fly, so I had to stare before I was sure that the plane that was coming off the runway was not one of the training flights that pretty routinely cruise over town.  The zoom lens on the camera gave confirmation of my thought: there is no mistaking the silhouette of a 51, even if the canopy is elongated.  The speed and manouvering was further evidence of that storied airplane.  It a matter of moments, it had banked, passed over campus and disappeared into the distance.

     For those who really have the dough, flights with the 51 are available, too.  For those with the dough and a license, those flights can include actually flying the 51.  On Tuesday afternoon I overheard someone who took advantage of that, and there were several (the TF went up four or five times on Tuesday).  The man said that he was taken by surprise at how the plane handled.  Yes, he had heard about its responsiveness, but to actually feel it!  That was amazing.

     Nine-0-Nine went up twice on Monday evening, Witchcraft once,  Toulouse at least once.  Tuesday would show that there were quite a number of people willing to fork over the money to go up in the air in one of these birds.  

     But for me, and for who-knows how many others, the "Fort" was the big draw.  

     Course today I am well aware now of what the B-17 really is.  When I was a youngster, maybe not so much; I could be forgiven for having less than a working understanding that "The Big 2" was more than something in a movie, more than black and white photographs in a book, more than the models that my grandfather and I constructed.  The "Flying Fortress" was behung with machine guns because it was designed to be a weapon defending itself against other weapons.  They were flying weapons of war, built and flown by men with the duty to carry bombs and drop those bombs on another country far from home, it and its crews were built and trained to be an agents of destruction.

     Yet it is of course much more than that now.  It has become, like many objects of that era, symbolic of the efforts made against the Axis Powers, the war we won, the "Good War" to borrow  Mr. Terkel's titling, the "We Can Do It!" spirit.  It stands in, too, for all the men who flew away from England and Hawaii and Morocco and Tinian (and Kansas and Michigan and California) and never came back; for the world the way it was before the Cold War and Dallas in '63 and Viet Nam and Watergate and White Water and 9/11 and Iraq and Daesh.  Many of the visitors who would stand in line for their couple of minutes inside would be veterans of Viet Nam, now as old as the vets that used to visit the "war birds" when I was a kid, the men who had flown a B-17 or flown in one.  Of them there are scant few left, in their last years, and maybe still brought to tears to look upon a "Fort" and recall not the war for itself but for the men that they served with, laughed with, flew with, fought with, survived with, and maybe out-lived over the intervening 80+ years.

     That there are so few of these "war birds" still around, let alone able to actually get up in the air, makes them all the more remarkable and all the more imbued with that symbolism.  Even for one such as this that never even got overseas for combat duty - that it was built along with "Forts" that did, that it would have gone into war if the war had lasted a few months more, is enough.  It is enough that it is still the "real deal," restored as much as possible to the state of the 17's that flew over Europe, that men who care are willing to spin the props, turn over the big Wright "Cyclone" engines with their blast of oil smoke and fly that thing off the ground and back up in the air where it belongs.

     That the 17's were touted and filmed and sent on bond drives goes no small way to this enduring idea of the "Fortress."  But for what-ever reason, the 17 and the other planes on tour will draw visitors to airfields just to see.  To see that history, that symbol, to maybe touch it, smell it.  We can't live it, but we can pay it due, maybe, give it a salute, say thank ya'.

     I don't think its nostalgia for me, if it ever could have been.  My understanding of history has grown some since I first grasped the idea of "B-17."   The milieu of its design, execution, mass production,  implementation, usage and loss, are not black and white like so many of the photographs.  And yet - and yet - I still feel the gravitational pull.  Mayhap even more-so, understanding some better that history, the pull draws me on, takes my attention for as long as I can give it and then retains it a little longer.  To look at Nine-0-Nine sitting on the hardstand is to look at more than a slice of history still alive (if a machine might be called living), it is, if one has some little understanding of that history, to look at an icon or an avatar or a stand-in (pick your favorite) for that history, in all its aspects - good, ill, and ambiguous.   

     Nine-0-Nine just prior to landing Monday evening.

     For all that I know of that history, know that it's not a "war bird" in today's air forces, know that there is no flak to burst about it on its flight path, know that there are neither Focke-Wulf nor Messerschmitt squadrons to harry it on the way to a target, to know and then watch the "Fort" passing overhead on final approach, lining up on the runway, and dip low before returning to Earth was, to put it simply, both spooky and endearing.  Another successful flight made, another easy landing to make.  Everything is in order, there will be no ambulances called to race across the hardstand, everyone will go home happy and healthy (at least as healthy as when they boarded anyway - or maybe a mite better after such a flight; there may be some magic instilled in even an old destruction machine, what?) and yet more stories told about the time they got to ride in the big bomber.  Like this story.    

     For isn't that what we all want?  A story?

MONDAY

TUESDAY: at the terminal

TUESDAY: the flight

WEDNESDAY: flying out

PHOTOGRAPHICA