Flying Fortress time machine offers touchstone to history

Originally published in the Memorial Examiner on Thursday, March 11, 2011.

by RUSTY GRAHAM
The Examiner

For Jim Powell, it’s about more — way more — than the opportunity to pilot a B-17 Flying Fortress, although he admits that’s a pretty cool gig.

Sitting at the controls of a multi-engine aircraft is somewhat routine for the experienced Continental pilot — he’s been flying for 33 years — even an aircraft with the history of the B-17, the U.S. workhorse that flew thousands of bombing missions over Europe during World War II.

No, for Powell, it’s more about keeping history alive, both for those who lived it — the veterans who served and fought — and for the generations that followed what Tom Brokaw dubbed the “greatest generation.”

He tells the story of taking up a former B-24 crewman, a veteran who had been shot down over Italy but survived the war. After takeoff, the veteran came and stood behind Powell, looking out through the pilot’s window.

“I was looking in his eyes and I could see all those people and experiences were coming back to him,” said Powell.

He pats the side of the “Liberty Belle”, the B-17 he just helped land. “It’s a time machine.”

Indeed. Going up in the restored B-17, with Powell and pilot Bob Hill at the controls, you can’t help but get a sense of what the aircrews — “the boys,” Powell calls them, because they were so young then — might have felt.

You get no idea of the horror of combat — there are no Axis planes shooting at you, no flak fields to fly through.

But still, as you sit there before takeoff, the four engines sputtering to life one by one, you wonder what it must have felt like more than 65 years ago, when each mission could be your last mission, when the odds were against your returning to friendly soil.

The fuselage rumbles underneath your seat as wafts of exhaust cast a pungent odor. The plane taxis to the runway where the engines are taken to full power while the great plane strains to break free of earth’s confines.

Finally, Hill and Powell release the brakes and you’re rolling, picking up more and more speed, and then you’re airborne. The mission is on.

One Tough Bird

The “Liberty Belle,” on display this week and weekend at Hooks Airport near Tomball, never saw combat — it was built toward the end of the war and never made it overseas.

The plane took its name, color and nose art from an actual B-17 from the 390th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force. The namesake plane flew 64 combat missions over Europe and once limped home after a particularly brutal mission.

Boeing built 12,732 B-17s between 1935 and 1945; 4,735 were lost in combat. B-17s flew in every theater of operation, but the majority were operated by the Eighth Air Force in Europe.

Given the moniker Flying Fortress by the press, the B-17 lived up to the title with its heavy armament and massive firepower. The B-17G, the last iteration built, carried a crew of 10 and had guns in its chin, nose, top, ball turret, waist and tail. That’s in addition to the 8,000 pounds of bombs it could carry.

The aircraft also had an uncanny ability to get its crews home, even after sustaining heavy damage. Photos and stories abound of B-17s landing with missing noses, wings, engines and tails. It was a bomber by classification, but it was a fighter in spirit.

Even so, its survivability increased dramatically with the introduction of the long-range P-51 fighter that could escort the bombers deep into enemy territory, where they once had to venture alone.

While most B-17s that saw combat were sold for scrap metal (and for the fuel from their tanks, Powell said), the current “Liberty Belle” was sold to Pratt and Whitney, who modified the plane by removing the nose cone and making it a test bed for turboprop engines.

Taken out of service in 1968, the plane was donated to an aviation museum in Connecticut, where after years of exposure to the elements, it was heavily damaged in 1979 when a tornado threw another plane into the B-17, breaking its back.

The wreck was stored until 1987 when an aviation enthusiast in Florida acquired it with the intent to restore the aircraft. The slow restoration began in 1992, when just after the turn of the century it was sold to Don Brooks of the Liberty Foundation, a non-profit museum dedicated to preserving U.S. aviation heritage.

The Liberty Foundation completed the “Liberty Belle’s” restoration back to her full wartime configuration. Brooks had the aircraft painted as the “Liberty Belle” as a tribute to his father, a tailgunner who flew combat missions in the original.

Fourteen years after restoration began, the “Liberty Belle” returned to the skies on Dec. 8, 2004.

Today the aircraft travels across the country, its mission to provide visitors the opportunity to “step back in time and gain respect for the men and women who gave so much to protect our freedoms,” according to press material.

Visitors can walk around and inside the aircraft for no charge; a 30-minute flight with the freedom to move about while in the air costs $430 per person.

Off We Go ...

Unlike a commercial flight, there’s no waiting until cruising altitude for permission to remove seatbelts and be free to move about the cabin. On the “Liberty Bell” permission is granted almost as quickly as the plane leaves the runway.

Powell’s son James, himself a pilot who gives flying lessons at Hooks Airport, is tending to passengers and gives the all clear. Passengers have been riding in crew seats that are rigged to the fuselage and not part of the original configuration.

Once up, passengers move around, taking in views from the different positions.

Most stunning is the view from the nose turret, where the bombadier sat and carried out his duties — the accurate placement of payload on enemy targets. From his seat extends a panorama of the ground below, 180 degrees of unobstructed view.

Behind the bombadier sat the navigator, who also operated the chin guns that are mounted below the nose turret.

A pilot and co-pilot flew the plane from the cockpit. Behind them was the flight engineer, who also served as the top gunner, and the radio operator.

Between the radio operator and the ball turret is the bomb bay, an open cavity traversed by way of a narrow footbridge and where passengers can see fiberglass replicas of bombs.

Just aft of the bomb bay was the ball turret gunner, whose protruding position was particularly perilous while flying through flak. Above the ball turret were the waist gunners, who fired from positions on either side of the fuselage and who were responsible for helping the ball turret gunner out of his position during heavy flak.

All the way aft was the tailgunner, the most dangerous crew position, Hill said. Most attacks came from the rear, and the tailgunner, who rode backwards at the end of the plane, was normally in the line of fire. Current passengers aren’t allowed in the tailgunner area, accessible only down a narrow crawlspace of fuselage.

Both Sides Now

The flight ends much too soon, really — we’re only in the air for 20 minutes or so. Still, it’s an exhilarating 20 minutes and a view of history that’s remarkably rare.

On the ground, Powell stands by the open crew door near the rear of the plane. The inside of the door is covered with the signatures of veterans who have taken the “Liberty Belle” flight.

Powell tells the story of being in Florida after a flight, when an older man asked him, with a heavy accent, what the signatures were for. Powell told him who could sign. The man said he was a veteran — could he sign? Of course, Powell told him.

“So he signs his name, then puts his Luftwaffe unit underneath,” said Powell. “He looked at me and smiled and said ‘I worked for the competition.’”

Powell then tells another story, a more poignant story from a veteran who took a flight.

After sustaining heavy flak damage on a bombing raid over Germany, a B-17 turned to go back to England. Somewhere over France a German fighter approached the aircraft.

What was left of the crew thought they were finished; they were out of ammunition and had no defense against the German plane.

But rather than bring the plane down — “it would have been easy pickings,” Powell said — the German flew alongside the B-17, like an escort.

Another German fighter approached and signaled with his finger across his throat for the first fighter to finish the job, to shoot the B-17 down.

The first fighter waved off the second one and continued the escort. When the planes reached the French coast, the German saluted the Americans and turned back toward the continent.

Years later, the American pilot heard of a Luftwaffe reunion and sent a letter relating the incident and asking about the German pilot. Turns out the German remembered, the two met at the reunion and now meet every year.

“Those guys in that plane (the B-17) were alive for a reason,” said an emotional Powell. “They had to get back and tell that story.”

rpdgraham@gmail.com

POSTSCRIPT
Just two months after this story was published, the Liberty Belle was heavily damaged by fire after an emergency landing in a cornfield in Illinois. But the spirit of the B-17 spirit prevails — the Liberty Belle is currently being rebuilt and restored with every intention of flying her again. https://www.libertyfoundation.org