May 13, 2012: Aviation Week Finale
Aviation Week, continued; See Part One here, See part two here.
Not yet having had our fill of of old planes, we ventured back down to Orange County Airport to take the plunge and see the nice people with the planes about joining in on one of their short trips.
We dutifully filled out and signed waivers, paid our fee, and waited as the first flights departed and returned. As the flight before ours was in the air, they gave us a short briefing about how to enter the plane, where to sit, and what would happen in the air.
Flight #2 returned, and the B-17 taxied to the front of the hangar as we waited outside. The passengers departed, then we were told to board.
I did not take many pictures while we were in the air, as we were busy enjoying the short flight, and gawking at the scenery. The following video clips are sort-of a Blair-Witch point-of-view within the plane, but we are hopeful that there is enough to convey a sense of how fun it is to ride in one of these. I don't have a Go-Pro video camera yet, so the resolution is not great, and with the noise of the engines the audio is pretty worthless, so turn the volume down a bit.
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| B-17 ready to start engines. |
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| B-24; the other ride |
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| Boarding with engines running. |
In this exciting clip, we board the plane through the tail door, and move forward through the waist, past the ball turret, through the radio room and bomb bay, to the forward cabin, right behind the pilots.
Immediately after take-off, we were allowed to get up and move around the plane. Since we were seated right behind the pilots, we had the first chance to go up into the nose. In the clip, we are still climbing out of Orange County.
Working our way back, we stopped briefly to look out of the top turret, then moved through the bomb bay, and stopped in the radio room. They fly the plane with the canopy above the radio room open, and they encouraged us to poke our heads out into the 150 mile-per-hour breeze.
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| The view outside: Newport Harbor in the background. |
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| Outside view to port from the radio room. |
Continuing through toward the rear, past the ball turret, the waist is the roomiest part of the plane, with large windows at the two waist gun positions. We watched the coast of Sunset Beach and Surfside pass below the starboard wing:
Back in the Radio room again, I poked my head up as we reached Long Beach and began to turn around. The port of Long Beach and the Queen Mary are visible in the distance. The guy with the sunglasses is the flight engineer, then we move forward, back through the bomb bay.
No one else was in the nose, so I went forward again and had the bubble to myself for quite a while. On commercial flights, one is never able to see directly ahead and watch the scenery approaching. The view from the nose is amazing: it is possible to look down, as well as forward, and I sat in the bombardier's seat to watch the ground pass below.
The bombardier's view:
Of course, the flight seemed too short, and all too soon, we were returning to Orange County when the engineer asked me to work back to the rear to find a seat for landing.
After landing, we drove down to the north end of the airport to watch the final flight return. The next day, the planes were scheduled to fly north to Santa Barbara, and will continue more or less north along the West Coast, then eastward throughout the summer. (See the website of the
Collings Foundation for their schedule.)
I do not like the term, "bucket list", but this qualifies as rare and adventurous experience that I have wanted to do for some time, and was thoroughly enjoyable and worth the admission. We highly recommend it.
