University Place

cc >> Thank you for coming out. What a wonderful night, a chance to really have a special time tonight, and we're in a for a real treat. I've had the good privilege of being an aircraft commander in EAA's B-17 Aluminum Overcast for many, many years, and I've been flying the airplane coast to

coast and I can tell you this

as I've traveled the country in the airplane, I've met an lot of people with an awful lot of interest in World War II and the greatest generation. After meeting all those people, I still can honestly tell you I've never met anybody with the level of enthusiasm, the level of passion, and the absolute dedication to telling the story of how ordinary people did extraordinary things in the marvelous airplane, the Boeing B-17. Mr. Chris Henry is part of staff here at EAA. He's been here now four years now? >>

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coast and I can tell you this

>> Seems like longer but that's because Chris is so involved. He started off with a love of B-17s, as many of us, as a kid. He grew up, actually, just south of where I grew up in Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh. I grew up in Erie. And he actually had his first exposure to B-17s was at age 12 when one of the touring B-17s of that era actually had an incident. And he was directly involved with the restoration, repair, and getting that airplane back in the air. Since, he's had his hands on eight, no less than eight of the nation's airworthy B-17's left flying in this country. And it's absolutely amazing to hear how he relates the incredible stories of our World War II veterans. So, folks, we're very, very fortunate tonight to have Mr. Chris Henry spend the evening with us and share with us the amazing stories of what the greatest generation did in this iconic airplane. Chris.

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>> How is everybody tonight? I could tell that if my grade school teachers could see this, they would never believe it. Me giving a lecture. Well, a little bit about myself. How many people are from out of town here tonight? Wow. Well, from outside of Wisconsin? I was born and raised in Pittsburgh. So that does make me a Steelers fan. I'm sorry. But starting off on a high note here, right?

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But born and raised in Pittsburgh, and, as Sean said, at the age of 12 I had a B-17 basically roll off a hill into my backyard. He overshot the runway a little bit, and through about a five- or six-year restoration, I got to help take part in that. I was 12. So I actually was in school and we were writing a report about what we did on summer break. And I wrote a report saying I was helping restore a World War II bomber, and my teacher sent me home for detention.

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With a note saying that he's making up these crazy stories about restoring a World War II bomber, and my parents wrote a letter back and they said, no, he's really doing that. I, by far, have one of the coolest jobs here at EAA. And I'm very, very thrilled to be part of a great team. Sean is, of course, part of that team, as well as Christy and Olivia. I don't know if they're here tonight or not, but really an amazing team to be part of, as well as the rest of the EAA staff here. This airplane would never go out the door if it wasn't for the entire team coming together, just like they did during World War II. How I got sort of my part of this is I work in membership services. When people order a B-17 flight, on our forms there was a little note that you could write whatever you wanted in, and usually it's this is a surprise birthday gift or something like that. Well, I started getting letters that said, my grandfather was a B-17 pilot, and they didn't know anything else. They just knew that he was a B-17 pilot. So I would do a little research. What was his name? Do you know any bomb groups or anything like that? And if they did, I'd try and help out, do a little research. And a lot of times they knew nothing. Through the veterans groups, I would actually track down the information, send back their notification of you're on the 10 o'clock flight on Saturday, and here's a picture of your grandfather in World War II. Something they'd never seen. So, through doing that, and I did this, by the way, without telling EAA. I sort of forgot.

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coast and I can tell you this

Eventually I started getting, what are you doing? And that sort of led me into helping out with the air tours division doing media flights, we put veterans, I can guarantee you we do something that no other B-17 does, and that's we fly veterans, when we can find them, World War II vets for free each stop we go to. We can't do them all, but we try to find a couple. We put them on the airplane, and they go on our media flight with us. And it's an honor to get those guys reacquainted with the airplane. And really, it's funny because they always come up with a cane or a walker or something, and about 10 minutes with the airplane and forget it, the cane is over pushed aside or the walker is over somewhere. But we'll talk a little bit about how I get to do that. But at first we've got to talk a little bit about the development of the B-17. Okay, so everybody knows the Flying Fortress. How did it get its name? Well, you've got to go back to basically when the airplane was built. The Air Corps, late 1934, there was no Air Force, so it was called the United States Army Air Corps. The Air Corps basically came out and said we want to have a competition. We want to have somebody make us a bomber. It had to be able to carry a couple thousand pounds, a useful load of bombs above 10,000 feet and go a pretty large range. Every airplane out there that was in the competition was a twin engine airplane. So nobody was really thinking about building something larger like a big four engine airplane. Does anybody else know what else was going on in the 1930s? The Great Depression. So a lot of these companies were, there's no way we're going to enter this competition, maybe win, maybe lose, when money is scarce. Boeing staked the future of the company and said we're going to go out and build this airplane that's revolutionary, boasting that the airplane could lose an engine on takeoff, basically, and complete its mission on three engines. So they went to the drawing board, built this four engine bomber made out of all metal. That thing was a giant, especially for that time. You can kind of see in the corner there, the Boeing 247, the airliner in the background. That was a big airplane for that time, and the B-17, excuse me, was even bigger than that. This is the first one. This was called the model 299, and it was bristling with more machine guns than anybody had ever seen. So they push it out of a hangar on roll-out day, and there's a Seattle Times reporter sitting there, and he says, my God, it's a flying fortress. And somebody was standing right there from Boeing and immediately trademarked it.

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So right off the bat they knew it was a good name. So the airplane, the competition was going to be held at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Wright Field, actually, at the time. And if you've ever been to the Air Force Museum in Dayton, right there behind the museum is where the runway used to be. So the airplane went there, in route actually broke records. So everybody there said, my God, this is going to be a knockdown easy contest for this model 299 that Boeing built. The other competition built a really, really fabulous airplane as well. Very graceful and we'll take a look at that in a minute. So the airplane gets there, has its first flight at the competition, everything goes great. It looks like it's going to just really pull ahead. And unfortunately this happened on the second flight. Once again, if you've ever been to the Air Force Museum, right behind the Air Force Museum is where this site is. The 299 took off with the pilots, I'm sure, nervous, excited, gunning the airplane, taxied, and took off with the internal gust locks on the airplane still on. There was no checklist at that time. It's because of this event that we have checklists now that pilots use. It was this event that started that. Everybody loved the 299. The problem was that the Air Corps couldn't turn around and give a contract to an airplane that just crashed at the end of a runway. So they really wanted it, they were impressed, but they had to go with the competition. And here's that beautiful design that the competition had come up with. That's a B-18. If you came in tonight and you came past the big green airplane out front, that's a DC-3 or a C-47. That's basically a modified DC-3 or C-47. Douglas just took what they knew worked and tried to piece it together and make a bomber out of it. So that's sort of what they came up with. Thank God those never saw combat. They used them for stateside trainers for navigators and bombardiers, and that's about it. Through a loophole, the Air Corps was actually able to order 13 B-17, and they did just that. The Royal Air Force was impressed by the airplane, and they ordered them. They were called Fortress 1s. In combat, the first airplanes to see combat were Royal Air Force birds. The problem with it was, believe it or not, even after all that armament, it still wasn't enough, especially in the tail. There was nothing back there to defend from enemy fighters. So Boeing took this beautiful airplane and they said, well, we have to hack into this thing to make it more of a combat machine. So they went to change the tail around. They put a tail gunner compartment in there called a tail stinger. They put power turrets, if you look on top. The top and the ball turrets that are now electric, you actually have to sit in there. And the firepower was greatly increased. That's a B-17E right there. The B-17E was going to be a revolutionary machine. They felt confident in it. So they deployed B-17Es mixed with a couple of earlier variants, and they said we're going to give your assignment. You're going to fly into an air base down on a nice Sunday morning. You don't have anything to worry about. You're going to fly into a base down in Pearl Harbor. And they did just that. B-17s, actually what happened was a Japanese task force was picked up on a primitive radar system that we had, and it was mistaken for the formation of B-17s coming in. And so everybody just kind of dismissed it. B-17s basically showed up in the middle of the fight. Their guns were still packed in crates on board. They had no ammunition. Low on fuel. So these airplanes had to basically land wherever they could. One of them even landed on a golf course. I had the honor of talking to a family member of a vet, reading his story. And he said that basically we were flying and we saw a big formation of something going on down there, and we thought it was a big flock of birds. And then when we got closer we could tell they were airplanes, and we said, boy, those Navy guys are showing off. They know we're coming in. They're trying to upstage us. And he said then one of them came out and shot out my number three engine, and he goes, I figured the Navy isn't sore at me so it really must be an enemy here today. And they ended up belly-landing their airplane, and they got out of the airplane, hid in the woods, and waited until the Japanese fighters and bombers had left. No B-17 crew members were lost that day. However, as you can see, several B-17s were indeed destroyed. So what a way to come into a war, right? Ed Hudson, his relatives actually flew with us on the B-17, and he's the first of what these stories are. These stories are gentlemen that actually flew with us. So these are direct ties to our airplane. And Ed, his family had a great story. He heard the fighters, went out and he saw the Japanese markings, what they called the meatballs on the wings. So he said everybody was shooting at them with shotguns, and he said nobody's going to hit anything with a shotgun. So they set up a.50 cal machine gun and he ran into a bunker and grabbed two cans of ammunition for the.50 cal. And he says he remembered walking to the doorway and then he blacked out. And when he came to, they were lifting a wall off of him and a bomb had actually hit the building that he was in and the only thing that saved his life were those two cans of ammo that actually jarred the wall off of him enough that he was able to not get hurt by the wall. He was immediately deployed to the Pacific, was a ball turret gunner on B-17s in the Pacific, and then with the 8th Air Force really split up its operation in England, got sent to Europe. He has the very rare distinction of being a ball turret gunner with both Japanese and German kills. He shot down Zeros and Messerschmitts. So pretty rare guy to have on board. Basically, they fought with what they had. A lot of the early airplanes we had were not very good. Think about this. There was a German air show prior to the outbreak of World War II, and during that air show, the German Luftwaffe put up more airplanes in the air show than existed in our inventory in the United States total. That's Navy, Air Force, everything. So a lot of people thought we were up against big odds already. And the B-17 immediately, and their crews, went out to the Pacific, started trying to bomb anything they could, Japanese targets, shipping, bases that were overrun, trying to just get back at what they could. And they used just a bunch of different airplanes too at that time. You can see a lot of oddball airplanes were way outdated, had no business being in combat, that were being used as best they could. Major Eugene Benedetti is one of those people. We were honored enough to have his daughter come out and fly with us. And he's the first one that I sort of talked to, or his daughter was the first one I talked to. Really excited. She had some pictures and she said would it be okay if I wore my dad's bomber jacket on the flight? And I said, well, sure. What's his story? And she said, well, he was in the 19th bomb group out in the Pacific, and he was out on a mission and his B-17 got attacked by seven Japanese Zeros. Shells from one of the attacks struck him in the back of the head, and he couldn't see out of his right eye. He knew he was wounded but tried to hand the airplane off. He was in pretty bad pain, and the copilot wouldn't take the airplane off of him and he couldn't figure out why. And then he found out that the copilot had been killed in the first round. So the airplane had the intercom shot out, they were still under attack so he couldn't get anybody to help him, so for a half hour he stood there flying that airplane, blinded in one eye and in great pain. Even once they got out of the combat area, the top turret gunner came down and stabbed him with the morphine to kill the pain, and he still refused to leave his seat. He says I'm going to help you land it. And he did just that. They belly-landed it back at base and brought his whole crew home. It took up until he reached the age of 90 to get him the silver star, which they eventually did give him. When she came out on the airplane to fly with us, she also had a Medal of Honor, and none of us had ever seen a Medal of Honor outside a museum display case, and it was because his brother-in-law was a gentleman by the last name of Basilone, and he had won the Medal of Honor in Guadalcanal. And that was a direct tie to them. They actually came out and did this piece on our airplane with them. So very amazing group of people. And I can't say enough, you'll hear it over and over and over again, the greatest generation, and they truly are. And you'll hear that several times tonight as to why they're the greatest generation. The B-17 was famous for its daylight operations in Europe. We couldn't have this presentation without talking about that. It was just as important to talk about the fact that it did go to the Pacific. I always liked that quote when he says the bloody Yanks are here. We basically invaded England, and England was turned into a giant aircraft carrier, if you will. And something we did differently and where the B-17 met its challenge is the Royal Air Force went at night. They would go under the cover of darkness, they would look for targets at nighttime, and that's where they would bomb. They looked where they thought it was. We had something called the Norden bombsight, and that allowed us to go in the daytime. So rather than just looking for a target where we think it is, we can go and hit that exact target we were looking for. They used to brag and say the Norden bombsight hit a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet. I think that was a little bragging on their part, but it was still a pretty good bombsight. And a bombardier actually flew the airplane on the bomb run as well through that bombsight. It was such a big secret. That was the biggest secret of World War II. It was such a big secret that they had to take an oath whenever they took the bombsight over. And every bombardier actually had to guard the bombsight when they were on base. So every mission, the airplane would actually go out of the airplane and be stored in a vault. So, funny story was there was a mission where they were getting ready to go fly a mission, everybody's ready and the target's fogged over so they're all stuck sitting around. And this gentleman said, well, we're stuck, we're just sitting out here cooling our jets with the airplane. They were having a USO show nearby, and Bob Hope with a bunch of girls came by. And everybody wanted to go see Bob Hope and these girls while this bombardier is stuck babysitting this bombsight in the nose of the airplane and he couldn't leave. So the front engineer is working on the engine, and he said, hey, watch the bombsight for a few minutes I just want to go see if I can see any of these USO girls. So he takes off, and in the meantime, the engineer is busy with his stuff. The guys from the bombsight depot come by and say we want to take a look at the bombsight and tweak it and make a couple adjustments. So they take the bombsight out of the airplane, and as they're walking off into the darkness, the crew comes back and says where's the bombsight? And there go these two shadows into the fog carrying their bombsight. And they said 10 guys ran across and tackled these guys in the mud and basically beat these poor guys up trying to get their bombsight back thinking they were German Nazi spies or something. But it was a big deal. It was a big secret during World War II. If you've ever seen our B-17 named Aluminum Overcast, how many people here have actually seen Aluminum Overcast? You see it especially during AirVenture time. That airplane is very important. It carries very important markings, and it's because those markings carried the same as Captain Hal Weekley's. Hal Weekley flew in the 398th bomb group in 8th Air Force. And that's actually him standing in the top left, the tall guy there. And funny story was if you got shot down, you usually had just a couple days. If you didn't turn up, they'd go through you footlocker and take all your stuff. And so Hal Weekley gets shot down and it took him about a week, week and a half to get back. And he said, in my mind I figured, you know what, there isn't going to be anything there. And he says, I get back and all of my stuff is there untouched. And he said, hey, I just got to ask, you guys didn't bother any of my stuff. And they said, you're too big of a guy, we were afraid that maybe you were still alive and you'd get back here one day.

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But he was very inspirational. He spearheaded not just keeping the airplane restored and flying, but he actually flew the airplane for many years. So if you've ever flown on Aluminum Overcast, there's a very good chance that Hal Weekley was you pilot. So, very important to have that airplane preserved in that paint scheme, especially because it's part of its legacy here. Captain Ed Stevens of the 457th bomb group flew with us. Prior to the war breaking out, he was an ambulance driver, he had medical training, and he was a private pilot. When the war broke out, he figured he wanted to do more, and he joined the Air Corps and was assigned a B-17, assigned to a crew, and they got very close. A lot of these crews would. As a matter of fact, a lot of them said that those are the only people they knew. They said they wouldn't even intermingle with other crews a lot of times because we just stayed with our group. And Captain Stevens named his B-17 Fish and Chips Special. I can understand a girl's name. I never really did understand Fish and Chips Special or some of the names that were on there. But his B-17, he was a very proud guy. He had just turned 20 and was given his own B-17. They were over a target near France, and they got hit multiple times by flak. Flak were black puffs of smoke. When you would see them, they didn't look like much but they were actually antiaircraft fire that would throw shrapnel around the sky. And so he lost two engines on the same side, and everybody on board the airplane was wounded in one way or another. A couple guys, their parachutes were damaged. They couldn't even bail out. And they told Ed, he was the youngest buy on board, yet he was the pilot of the airplane. And they said, turn back over the water, call rescue and bail out and save yourself. And instead, Captain Stevens descended the airplane to about 500 feet over the water, nursed the airplane back on two engines, refusing to give up his crew. And when they were on a few mile final, he lost a third engine, and he managed to get it down on one engine. The airplane rolled off the runway. He couldn't keep it on the center of the runway anymore on just one engine and, of course, with the damage. And when he gets out, and this is where I think the greatest generation comes into it, rather than getting out and thanking God you're down or whatever tradition you have, he immediately starts giving first aid to his crew. His crew was the first thing in his mind. Had to take care of the guys. And somebody snapped that photo, and that's actually him doing first aid on one of his crew members. And, of course, that's him in the back of our airplane getting ready for a mission with us. And I'd love to know just what he was thinking about or what he was feeling at that time. But this is part of the legacy this airplane, for these guys, is bringing back these years and these guys the memories, hopefully the good memories of what they went through. Princess Pat was a B-17F flown by Captain Pat Patterson of the 388th bomb group. The day we had him set for the media flight, we had to break it to him that he wasn't going to actually be flying the airplane that day. He didn't take that too lightly. He was really wanting to fly it. But Pat has an interesting story. On one mission, he said he was assigned to go and carry a Stars and Stripes reporter. And he says that was no big deal, they threw him in the back and I never heard from him really and never thought anything else of it. And he goes, it wasn't until years later that he found out that was Andy Rooney that he had on board with him. And Pat was very, very deep about talking about every decision you made over there could change the outcome of your life. On one mission their airplane had been damaged on a prior one, and they were basically given the day off. You have a free day. You can go do whatever you want. And their ball turret gunner said I'm going to fill in on this other crew who has a sick ball turret gunner, and I'm going to get home one day ahead of you guys and sort of made a joke out of it. And they all sort of took it as a big joke. Well, the airplanes left, and they used to call it sweating out the mission whenever the B-17s would all be coming back. Everybody would go out and sort of wait to see if your friends were coming back or who made it back and who didn't. And they said there was one B-17 circling out there, and they just couldn't figure out what it was. And finally they talked to somebody and found out it was the airplane with their ball turret gunner on it. And the airplane had been damaged in the fuel tanks, the landing gear wouldn't come down, and the ball turret gunner was trapped in the ball turret. And they were circling out there trying to figure out what to do. And they circled out there for about a half hour until they figured out there was nothing else they could do, and they ended up having to belly-land. And Captain Patterson said there isn't a day that goes by that he doesn't think about that guy's name. And just one simple gesture changed the outcome of that guy's life and everybody else's life too. Lieutenant Rob Maher was given a camera for his 19th birthday. His mom said, take some pretty pictures for me. So he took it on a combat mission with him and took pictures of German flak coming up at him. I'm pretty sure that's not what she meant by that.

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But he was going to come out with us on a media flight. That's actually him. He's the copilot sitting there on the right. And while he was up with this camera one day, he radioed his escort and said pull in close, I'm going to get a picture of you. And so he did. The families sent these photos to us, and me and a couple friends tracked down which fighter squadron it was, contacted their association and found out the pilot of that airplane was still alive and actually like an hour and a half from where we were. So we arranged to have the fighter pilot come down, and the two of them flew together and we didn't tell them. We just put them in the radio room and put that picture up. And they started arguing about who took the picture and who was in it.

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And then it finally came to that they had never met, didn't know each other, and 70 years later here they are riding in the same airplane right next to each other. World War II was special not just for the brave crews that fought on board the airplanes and serviced them but also for women. This was the first war that you saw women in a great number coming out of the home. Blanch Barnes is one of those people. She joined the American Red Cross, and she was sent to England with what I always said must have been an ice cream truck for pilots. It was a truck that played swing music driven by a pretty girl that was handing out doughnuts. And I said I couldn't imagine her not having a hard time over there at an air base. So that picture on the right is her handing out doughnuts with the 303rd bomb group. We found out that she was on board. Her family told us this story that she was going to be coming out that weekend. So what we did was we had the crew buy doughnuts, and we decorated the doughnut boxes with her pictures and different artwork. And she instinctively took the doughnut boxes and actually started handing out doughnuts to the veterans that were there.

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But it's just a small thing. It's something silly. We bought a box of doughnuts, but that will go a long way with her. She'll remember that. And she was very grateful that we paid a few minutes of tribute to her service as well, not to forget the people that did serve the bases in that manner too. They didn't all fly and get the glamor. Now, we've all heard of Rosie the Riveter. Well, here is a very real Rosie the Riveter, June Smokey Morris. She worked for Boeing in Seattle. He father was a merchant marine, and she worked the night shift installing fuel tanks. She would put the fuel tanks in the wings and then would seal the wings, and that was it. That was the final stop on the assembly line. The airplanes would leave for Europe. One morning she was notified that her father's ship was sunk by a German U-boat, and Boeing called and said you don't have to come in tonight, we heard the news. And she said no, I'll be there. That night, through a weird turn of events, Boeing was actually having a labor dispute, and they called her once again and said there's going to be basically a picket line, you don't have to cross it, don't come to work. And she came anyway. And she said it's not about anything else other than I want to get revenge for my father. And she crossed the picket line. And her bucker, if you know how to rivet, you know you need two people to do it, her bucker was named Helen, and Helen crossed with her. And that night, those two women finished a B-17 by themselves. Her foreman was trying to get her off the wing, and she said if you want to get me off the wing, you'll have to come up here and get me. And he shied away after that and they said they never saw him the rest of the night. So it was just her and Helen, and they finished. The next morning that airplane did roll off the assembly line and was ready to go. June had built literally probably thousands of B-17 but had never flown in one, and we gave her that chance out in Seattle and she finally got to fly in a B-17. The funny thing about this was June's rather short, and in Seattle they send a lot of tall reporters. And June immediately wanted to take them under the wing where she worked. So it was pretty funny watching guys, seeing pictures from the crew coming back, they were six-foot tall, sort of bent over trying to hand these microphones in her face and everything and she was walking around just like nothing showing them all about rivets. So I think they just wanted to get her on film saying what a great flight it was and instead they got a half hour lecture on how to rivet.

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So they definitely got a great lecture that evening. Magical things happen with this airplane. And this is one that if I were to put a year's worth of planning into it, I couldn't have pulled this off. Faith Goldman approached me and said that her husband, who was near the end of his life, he was not feeling well, was not doing very well, he was a Holocaust survivor, he was in a concentration camp, and one of the things he really wanted to do was fly in a B-17. And I, for the life of me, cannot put the two together as why he wanted to fly in this B-17 so bad. So I did give them a call back, and I asked, I said what's the tie? Why do you want to fly in the B-17 for? And he said when we were liberated, we were liberated by American GIs and they had no idea what they were looking at. They didn't know what this was. So they just kept passing it higher. I guess in true military fashion, just up the chain in command. And finally they contacted a bomb group, the 306th bomb group, and the 306th bomb group didn't know what to do either, but they loaded their B-17 with food and they flew a B-17 over this concentration camp and literally bombed the concentration camp with food, with bread and cheese and a bunch of different things. So I said, okay, let me see what I can do. She said we can't afford the money for the flight, is there anything we can do because all of our money has gone into his medical bills. So I took her name down, and I had everything set aside. Not a half hour later, a guy calls and he says I flew on your B-17, it was really great, I just want to donate, I'd like to donate a flight to somebody else so that they can experience this. And I said, well, boy, do I have a story for you. So I told him the story, and he was very excited to do it. He wanted to remain anonymous, but he wanted to be part of this. So he did it. We're very excited. We call her back, and everything's set. I figured that'd be the end of the story, right? That would make a good slide in my presentation. Well, about a day later, a guy calls and he said I want to buy a flight for my father. And I said, okay. And I started talking to him about B-17s. He said, well, he's very proud of his missions but he's really proud of this one time that he got to bomb a concentration camp with food. And I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. He goes, yeah, he was a 306th bomb group pilot, and he flew a B-17 named Pandemonium Reigns. So we put the two together on the flight in the radio room and just let them talk. We didn't tell them right away until they got next to each other and sat in there. We told them, by the way, this is the guy that dropped food. And we just them go. As you can see, there's a lot of emotions going on that day. Once again, I could have planned that for years and it wouldn't have worked out that way. The crew of Miss Liberty Belle is a good story here, a very poignant story to tell. I have a piece of metal here. After the presentation, if anybody would like to take a look at it, I can show you this. I actually have a piece of Miss Liberty Belle. She was assigned to the 305th bomb group, had flown 65 missions, and on her 66th mission, she was coming back, had lost an engine over the target, was still able to keep up with everybody, lost another engine crossing the sea but was still okay, no wounded on board, and as they were on about a three-mile final for the base, another B-17 fired flares, meaning there were wounded aboard. So the crew decided to go around. Let's let the wounded guys get down first. And on the go-around, they lost a third engine, and they were coming right down into the town of Chellaston, England, which was where they were based. These people had formed friendships with these people. They certainly didn't want to come down in the middle of their town. The pilot firewalled the good engine. He tried to restart one of the bad engines to get a little bit of power out of it, and he stood the airplane up almost on one wing and went around the church steeple right in the middle of town. He made it, cleared the town until the airplane crashed just outside of it. Villagers saw the whole thing take place and they rushed the crash site trying to pull crew members out of the fire. Eight of the 10 that day were killed on board the airplane. To this day, they built a memorial there, and to this day, every day they go and they honor their crew. There are flowers there. And every August 3rd, which was the date of the crash, they have a big ceremony there, a very big ceremony. Well, the crash was August 3rd of '43, and August 3rd of 2013 what we did was we celebrated by carrying pieces of Miss Liberty Belle on board Aluminum Overcast, and it was right here during AirVenture. We've videoed some of it, and we sent it over to them, sort of in a stream format almost, so that during their presentations over there, they were able to actually use it and sort of make a connection that we were carrying pieces that they had sent us. They were airborne once again on that day. And they had sent us a plaque and a flag that had actually flown over the crash site over there. But the one thing about these missions is you'll hear people talk about milk runs and easy flights, there was no such thing. A lot of people, you hear about them, especially when they talk about the Memphis Belle, and they'll say, well, its 25th mission was a milk run. No such thing. Especially in 1943. But even throughout that whole war, anything could have happened. We talk about the airplane being built Boeing tough, is a lot of times what people say. It sounds like a commercial for Boeing 737 or something like that. But the B-17's legacy truly is bringing its crews home. A lot of the crews that we've talked to said the one thing they felt good about was getting in a B-17 knowing that you had that airplane, it was going to bring you home. It was such a rugged airplane. The airplane really is overbuilt. And Sean can go into a lot more details about that. But the airplane is a very, very ruggedly built airplane. The bottom picture there is a B-17 named Mizpah. It took a direct flak hit over a target. The nose was immediately blown off. The pilot and copilot, believe it or not, are still in control of the airplane and kept the airplane wings level long enough to get the crew to bail out. The daughter of the pilot flew with us just this past year. So that was one of the photos she had taken from another crew member in formation. Top right picture there is a B-17F that had come back without a tail. I mean literally without a tail. Just completely shot off. You can see also some of the horizontals are shot off there. My favorite story, though, is the one on the left. The one on the left is a B-17 limping home on a two engines, and they were on a pretty wild final and they lost another engine. So the only good engine they had was their number three, and they were able to get it down. They said number three is running good, we'll get back. And they go to the runway and landed, and as they rolled off the end of the runway there and just kind of let it go out into the grass, the number three engine fell off the airplane.

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coast and I can tell you this

And so it had truly given up everything it had for them, I guess. That was the big thing. There was a lot of these B-17s that come back and you'd see them, you'd be at your base watching the plane fly over and you'd say there's no way that airplane should be flying. It's missing so many parts and engines and everything else. Every once in a while we get a veteran who wants to fly with us or a story, and they tell us a story, and I'm a B-17 fan but even I, every once in awhile, am like wait a minute, is this true or am I getting taken for a ride on this one. And George Freitag is one of those guys that told me a story, and I thought I better double check this before I start telling people about this. And he was right. He was on a mission, he was a top turret gunner in the 483rd bomb group, and his best friend sat just across the bomb bay behind him in the radio room. And on a mission, they took a direct flak hit in the bomb bay. Luckily, the bombs did not explode. However, the explosion was massive. If you've ever been in a B-17, there's a catwalk that goes over through the bomb bay, and it twisted that catwalk, and the pilot wrote in the log book for the airplane that it loosened the left wing. I'm not really even sure what that means, but it's not good. And so George was obviously concerned about his friend in the radio room because the radio room had significant damage. It was on fire. So he made his way back and found his friend was okay but wounded and a little bit in shock and his parachute had been shredded. And I think this next part of the story is why young guys fight wars. His friend looked up at him and he said if you need to bail out, if this airplane is going down, you bail out, don't think twice. And George Freitag said, if you're not going to go, I'm not going to go. And he stood up and took his parachute off and threw it out the window. And that is not something I think I would have enough guts to do.

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coast and I can tell you this

The pilot up there says, well, great. They're still under attack, they're getting shot up, and he says now I've got two guys without parachutes back there. So he nursed the airplane home. And they had nothing. They had no landing gear, no flaps, the bomb bay doors wouldn't close. He says, you know it's bad when other airplanes in the formation, they'd be in tight formation but once they'd get close to base they'd loosen up a little bit. And he said, you know it's bad when other airplanes are pulling up next to you and taking pictures.

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coast and I can tell you this

So they landed and they had no brakes. So what they did is they took parachutes and tied them to the waist gun mounts. And as they landed, they deployed the parachutes, and it stopped the airplane. They stopped that night, they got home. When an airplane like this would come back so damaged, basically the CO would talk to the maintenance officer and they'd write the airplane off, and then they would go down, they'd pull parts off the airplane to use to keep other B-17s flying. And the maintenance officer came back and said there isn't one single part on that airplane worth saving.

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coast and I can tell you this

So the next day, they went down to count, they said it was a big hobby if you came back with a lot of damage, they'd say let's count the holes in the airplane. They stopped at just over 36,000. Thousand. So I had to double check this. And I actually got a hold of the Air Force, and the Air Force backed up the claim to the point that they sent me to Warner Robins, Georgia. At Warner Robins Air Force Base, there's actually a memorial for this airplane built by the bomb group. And it's a very true story. 36,000. That's where they stopped, and I don't know if they got tired or they had to go on another mission or what happened. But that's incredible. And that's one that even as a B-17 fan I'm like my God, that's a lot. That's just incredible. And it's an incredible testament to the aircraft. Todd Touton was going to fly with us this year at AirVenture. His wife wanted to surprise him, and she said you know what would be really great is in some of the letters home, he mentioned to his wife that he had taken a little damage on one of the missions. And she said is there anyway you could possibly find anything like that. So I did a little research in the 384th bomb group's association and found this picture, and that's his father William Touton, and there's his B-17 that he brought home. That was a flak burst under the left wing. I'm looking at that and I'm thinking that had to be a ground collision somewhere. And it was a flak burst. My favorite part of that isn't necessarily the damage. It's the cocky 19-year-old kid leaning on the airplane showing off what he brought home to his girlfriend.

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coast and I can tell you this

So I love that. Very cocky. Yeah, I brought it back.

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coast and I can tell you this

We had the honor of having Sergeant Harvin Abrahamson on board with us. He was a radio operator in the 47th bomb group. Great story he had. He had two amazing stories. Sitting in the radio room of the airplane, the airplane got hit by flak. And these flak shells were 88 shells. So they were pretty massive shells, and one came through the floor, passed between his legs and through the ceiling and never exploded, leaving two large holes in the airplane. And he said, someone was looking out for me that day. The other story he told me that was great, and once again just normal people doing extraordinary jobs, is he had a deal with the bombardier. The bombardier said, gee, you're sitting right behind the bomb bay. When I open up the bomb bay doors, just verify the doors are open. We'll drop the bombs. Verify the bombs are clear, and then we'll close the doors. Verify the doors are closed, and now nobody has to go and actually climb all through this airplane and leave their gun post to try to get back to make sure everything's okay. So Harvin said, well, sure, no problem. Little did he know there'd be a problem. On a mission just near Berlin, they dropped their bombs and they had a 500-pound bomb hung in the bomb bay. The front shackle had let go, the rear shackle did not so the nose of this bomb was hanging out of the bomb bay, and the rear propeller had spun off. So it was a live bomb hanging in the bomb bay. Now, if you've ever been in a B-17, you know on the catwalk there's those ropes and everything like that. Well, that wasn't there during wartime. That was just a catwalk. There was no safety area there. And you're up at altitude, so you've got the walk around bottle of oxygen you're carrying with you. And he said, I knew I was in trouble because I could see the bombardier and the front engineer motioning to me, and one of them had a screwdriver.

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coast and I can tell you this

And he said, so this isn't going to end good for me, I can tell.

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coast and I can tell you this

And so what they basically figured out to do is they were going to hold on. One would hold him by the parachute harness, one would hold him by his jacket, and they were going to lean him out over this catwalk, and with a screwdriver and some pliers, he was going to try to get this shackle unbent to drop this bomb. And he said, you know, it didn't hit me until I was looking down. We were at 30,000 feet. He says, I was looking down and I said, gee, if my mom could see me now, she'd be really unhappy about this situation.

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coast and I can tell you this

And they did get the bomb free and came back, and we were lucky enough to have him on board as a radio operator on our Freedom Flight, which we'll talk about here in a few minutes. A quote that I always loved from just about every B-17 vet that I've talked to is that you knew it was going to bring you home. They had pride in their airplanes. One of my favorite quotes from Andy Rooney was always he had a choice of going into a B-24 unit or to a B-17 unit, and he didn't know the difference. And he said to this guy in the Air Corps, he said what would you do? And he says, well, they've built more B-24s, the B-24s can do this better and this better. He says, okay. And he says, well, if it was you, what would you do? He says, I'd go with the B-17.

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coast and I can tell you this

He says, well, that made up my mind for me. We had a gentleman fly with us who flew on a B-17 named Sweet Pea. Sweet Pea is pictured in the left picture here. And Sweet Pea actually took a direct hit from a flak shell that exploded, and the airplane was able to make it back in that condition. The waist gunners were severely wounded, but one of them did make it back. Unfortunately one did pass away in the returning mission. The airplane landed, and they just happened to have a Boeing tech rep there. And they called this guy from Boeing, and they said you've got to come out and check this out. And they came out and looked at the airplane. They figured out it held together by I think they said three stringers and just a couple feet of the floor were holding the airplane together, and it still made it back. As a matter of fact, Sweet Pea returned to combat. So not only did it make it back, they used it again. The picture on the right is an interesting photo. That's a B-17 assigned to the 305th bomb group named Dynamite. A gentleman we carried on board with us in Texas, that was his father's airplane. If you notice, it has a black sort of area in the bottom. We really didn't know if this daytime bombing thing was going to work out. It was pretty bold. We had a lot of big losses, early on especially. So they took a few B-17s and they painted them with black bellies and they tried to go at night and see what would happen. And it didn't work out very well. But these airplanes maintained their black bellies, and they did a few oddball missions here and there. Dynamite was so shot up that it just became patchwork over patchwork over patchwork, and finally they said that's it, we can't patch this thing anymore. So they hooked it up to a tow bar and they towed it down to the scrapyard for the base. They said it was almost like a funeral procession. As they were towing it down, all the flight crews that had served on this airplane that it had brought back because they had never lost one on this airplane, followed the airplane and walked behind it as they towed it down to the junkyard. Everybody was sad to see it go, but there just wasn't anything left to patch anymore on this thing. So where are they all now? A lot of people say we built just around 13,000 B-17, where are they? Well, when we won World War II, we had this massive Air Force now but we had no enemy, and I think a lot, especially the guys that fought in World War II, were sick of war and they certainly didn't want to have anything to do with it anymore. We had this massive force of bombers and nothing to do with them. So what they did was they started cutting them up in places like Arizona, if you're familiar with the boneyard out there now. Different places. Chino, California, and Kingman, Arizona. And the picture on the right is actually a still from a movie called The Best Years of Our Lives, if you've ever seen that with Dana Andrews. That's him there getting ready to get up in his old airplane. The wild thing about that was everybody thought, wow, that was a really great set that they pulled together to make this happen. Well, it's not. They were just scrapping B-17s, and they just went out and filmed with Dana Andrews out there. But just about all of them were cut up. There were a few here and there that they saved. Our B-17 was one of the lucky ones. In order for them to be saved, they almost had to find a way to survive. The famous Memphis Belle was waiting in Altus, Oklahoma, to get scrapped. A noted newspaper reporter went down there, saw it, did a report about it, and they made it a war memorial. They bought it for $375, and they took it from, they flew it from the boneyard down to Memphis. That airplane, of course, now is being restored in Dayton, Ohio. But there's our B-17 there. It flew many different missions. It was a cargo plane at one point. It was an agricultural sprayer. It was going to spray fire ants, I believe. A gentleman by the name of Dr. Bill Harrison bought it, and he had the vision of restoring the airplane to fly back in its combat configuration. And he was going to organize something, I think, called B-17s Around the World. And, of course, what happened was operating a B-17 is not cheap, and it was quite an endeavor to restore the airplane and continue to fly it. So through his efforts, he got it to us, and we've continued that restoration. We're still continuing the restoration. As we find parts available, we put them on the airplane. It's a labor of love. It's like having an old car that's very intricate, finding hood ornaments and stuff like that. Well, imagine a B-17 where we're trying to find compasses and different things to put in different compartments on the airplane to make it as accurate as possible. A lot of people ask, we're the Experimental Aircraft Association, why do we operate a B-17? It almost doesn't seem right. It's like a Prius company operating a Sherman tank. And the reason that we do is because it starts with our heroes. We inspire our youth by honoring our heroes. That's something that I keep telling people. That in this day and age when it's so tough to feed people, to get them excited about aviation, it's important that we remember, especially when we have our World War II heroes here, to pay tribute to them and to honor them, and by doing that, we can get our youth excited about this. We bring the B-17 to an airport, suddenly there's a reason to go to your local airport. A great example of this is Don Taylor and Robert Taylor. Robert Taylor is in the black and white picture. He was a B-17 bombardier in World War II. He was killed on a mission over Europe, and his grandson is an F-15 pilot today. But it doesn't stop there. It was because of the B-17 that he got interested in aviation as a kid. He started building models and reading books, and he actually attended the EAA Air Academy here. He was in the first graduating class of the Air Academy and after that joined the Air Force and said I want to fly F-15s. And there you have it. That's his actual wife sitting next to him who's also an F-15 pilot. So we were able to put him back on the airplane as well in Indianapolis and fly him, and he got to go up and sit in the seat that this grandfather sat in on a B-17. Having never met his grandfather, he said that was the closest he had ever felt to him was getting into that seat and seeing what he did every day. Another special thing to remember is this airplane is special for a lot of reasons and a lot of different meaning. I think it's interesting that a B-17, an airplane built for war, is used in so many different ways today. And it has a special way of bringing people together. We learned of Mr. Tarabula's story here. He was over in the 8th Air Force. He was a ball turret gunner, and he had been writing this girl back home. And he had flown 24 missions. He had to fly 25 early on to go home. So he wrote two letters prior to his 25th mission. One was if he didn't make it back, and it was for his buddies to mail to her. The other one was a proposal, and he had, prior to going over, he knew he loved this girl. He bought an engagement ring and hid it in his safety deposit box and told her father. So he came back from his mission barely. On this mission, his airplane was damaged severely by flak. The landing gear wouldn't come down, and he's sitting in the back of this B-17 and he goes, God, get me through this. And if you pull me through this one, I swear I'll never fly in an airplane again. And they belly-landed back at base, and when he got out, he kissed the ground and says, I promise I'll never fly another airplane again. He sent a Western Union telegram home and in the telegram proposed to his girlfriend, and they still have the telegram. When they were flying with us, it was their 70th wedding anniversary, and we found out so what we did was we surprised them with a cake out at the airplane. What we didn't know is that he had sworn never to fly. So we're getting ready to put him on the airplane and he goes, I'm not flying. We're like, you have to. He's like, I can't. So she did. She'd never been up in a B-17, never seen one up close, and, of course, there were a lot of tears. And she said, I had no idea that this is what he did. She goes, I had no concept whatsoever of exactly what he flew on over there. And in true fashion, just like every man in my family at least, immediately after cutting that cake, he was gone. So in all the pictures, it's his daughter and his wife cutting the cake, and he's in the background eating the cake. So that's a very rare photo of him cutting the cake. Freedom Flight is something we did here. If you guys, if anybody lives locally here and remembers last April, we had the idea of putting an entire crew back together and representing an entire crew, bombardier, navigator, all the way through the airplane, all 10 guys. That's rapidly becoming something very hard to do. We're losing our World War II veterans about 500 American World War II veterans a day. So we figured we'd better do it now. And it was sort of my baby. I was one of the guys that really pushed to do it. I was really excited about it. I reference you once again to the fact that I'm from Pittsburgh, and our winters end in March. You guys do winter hardcore.

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coast and I can tell you this

And so we had this flight scheduled for mid-April. We thought this was going to be no big deal, and I wake up that morning and literally we had gotten like three inches of snow, and it was still snowing that morning. And I was like, oh God. We had a military jeep parade lined up. We had a lot of hard work. I had called just about 250-300 houses to get the 10 World War II vets that we had for that flight. And they changed. We would have, Kyle works with me down in membership, I probably said three or four times, hey, you know what, I have all 10. And then we got a phone call that somebody fell or somebody wasn't feeling good and couldn't fly. So we'd have to search again for these people. It was really a hunt. So that day we're sort of stalling, if you will, because we're trying to figure out what we're going to do for weather because we didn't have the weather to fly and we had these guys here. We're over in the museum, and it's time to go over to the other side where the B-17 is. And I go outside, I'm thinking we have this warm bus we're going to put these guys in. It'll be great because it's only like 30 degrees outside. And here all the Jeeps, all these guys that had these restored World War II jeeps brought them anyway through the snow. And they're all parked outside the door. And I said, well, I'm very thankful. At least we can have the parade. We had a police escort, and I said the veterans will be in the bus. One of them heard me say that, and I thought I was going to get beat up. And they said, I want to ride in the jeep. I said, it's 30 degrees outside. And he says, I don't care, I'm 90.

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coast and I can tell you this

I said, okay. So they all piled into these jeeps and into different vehicles that we had out there, and they went over to the other hangar. We had a police escort. We got over there. We had our time to actually take vinyl strips and put all their names underneath the crew positions. I didn't tell them that. When they got into the hangar, suddenly this B-17 had their name above their crew position on the airplane. And they can go and show their families. And that was the best thing, sharing this day with their families as well. So the best news of the day, we had reporters all over the airplane, we had the crew all over the airplane, and Sean pulled me aside and said we have weather, we can fly right now. So I think that was the quickest exit of reporters I've ever seen from a B-17, and pushed the airplane outside and we got to take them up and go for the flight. So 10 World War II veterans were reunited, forming an entire crew in our B-17 once again. And that picture there was not prompted. The Captain Bob Abresch, our pilot, called an order for attention, and they all saluted And lucky enough, somebody had a camera pointed that way and took that picture. Once again, I wish I could take credit that I planned that, but I did not. But what a great honor for these guys when they came back. The one comment I got that sticks with me about the day is that every time they'd ever flown in a B-17 it was in an air show. So it was 70-80 degrees. And it was the waist gunner that came up to me. He said thank you for giving us back our airplane. And he goes, that's how we remembered it. It was cold. You could see your breath. He said, this is exactly how it was in that airplane. So it was kind of something I never thought about that these guys only had an opportunity to do it in an air show. I got to take part in a very special flyover. Even for a Steelers fan, this was pretty cool. I had a chance to have the B-17 fly over Lambeau Field. And Sean and George are the pilots on this. And me and a couple friends went out to get some pictures from the ground of the flyover. And the airplane did this cool flyover, it was on TV, and I'm bragging to all my friends. That's the airplane I work with. Once again, I figured close the book, that was a cool chapter and fantastic. The next day, I come into work to an email that just says thank you. And I open it up and it was from a family that was laying their World War II father to rest just north of that field, and he served in the 398th bomb group. And they are from Arizona and had no idea any of this was going on and this B-17 would be out and about. And imagine, they said we had just come out of the home and here comes this B-17 in his squadron markings with the triangle Ws on it. They said it was just amazing. Of course, we invited them down to go through the airplane and take a tour. But once again, something that we planned one thing and it spurs off into something else special. It's really an honor to be associated with this. I always say we restore more than paint and rivets; we restore legacies. And that's very true. If you notice some of us here, if you've flown on the airplane, you may have one of the green flight jackets. It's the first thing you have to get when you fly on the airplane because it's cool. Girls like it, so you've got to wear that.

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coast and I can tell you this

So those jackets sort of took on a different meaning for all of us here. This was my first chance that I got to help with a media flight. I was very excited, and I had a full boat. I had two World War II veterans. I had eight reporters. It's very hard sometimes to get the reporters committed because they, of course, want to go out and cover the breaking news. And we were all set to fly. And Justin Bieber got caught in an airport with a monkey. You wouldn't think that would have anything to do with the other, but it did. The news wanted to go and cover that. So only one person showed up for the media flight, in addition to the top turret gunner veteran that we had. And so they did the veteran. They said, well, we have the veteran here, we're going to make right by him. They put the veteran on board, we put the one newspaper reporter that did come out, and then we put the rest of just his family. We put his whole family on board, and we took they up and let them share that together. That was on a Thursday. So on Monday I came in and I get a phone call from the one son who I'd been in contact with helping set this all up. And the son said, we want to thank you and we can't thank you enough. It was a great day. We had the whole family together. We want to buy one of the green jackets for him. I said, absolutely. And he goes, I want to express ship it. Well, express to ship this thing, he wanted it over-nighted, and it was like 60 bucks. And I said, are you sure? It's like 60 bucks to express this thing overnight, over-night it to you. And he said, well, no, definitely. I said, tell me about it. What did he think getting back in the airplane? He said, well he loved it. And he said, and that night we all went to dinner and he used to say that after each of his missions he would have a shot of scotch when he'd get back to base. So that night we had a steak dinner for him, and he had his shot of scotch. And he said, that night he passed away, and the jacket is because we want to bury him in the B-17 jacket. That really struck home for us here. That wasn't lost on any of us, that what we're doing isn't just flying an old airplane. It's preserving a legacy for these gentlemen. Imagine doing something at the age of 18, 19 years old, that 70 years later when you're making plans for your final destination, you are adamant about the fact that you want tail gunner 91st bomb group on you tombstone. That that's how you want history to remember you. That is not lost on any of us here that operate this airplane. And like I said, it couldn't be done without the amazing crew that we have from Sean, to the pilots, to the people that take care of the maintenance, to Christy and Olivia that battle the airports and getting the airplane in and out and everything else you can imagine goes with that, to the people that come out and volunteer on it and clean it and everything. It's really a team effort. And I'm going to open it up for questions here in a few minutes, but before I do that, you have a chance to say thank you, that's our big thing here. We actually have a World War II hero with us here tonight. Sergeant Fred Zurbuchen, would you please raise your hand there. 8th Air Force ball turret gunner.

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coast and I can tell you this

I'm sure he wouldn't mind answering some ball turret questions later on. We'll nail him down, if we have to. But I want to thank you for coming out especially. Are there any other World War II veterans out here tonight. Thank you. Where did you serve, sir? >>

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coast and I can tell you this

>> Well, thank you very much for your service. Another round of applause.

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coast and I can tell you this

And before we go tonight, of course we have the cockpit climb. I am going to open it up to questions here in a minute, but I wanted to say thank you for coming here tonight as well and listening to me. I've been coming here since the '90s. Never ever in a million years thought that I'd be a presenter here in the founder's wing of the museum. So it is not lost on me what I got to do this evening and talk with all of you guys. Feel free to come up, ask questions. I'm more than happy to do that, and once again, thank you. If you get a chance to see a World War II veteran out, please stop and say thank you for his service. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you.

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