I saw a great sight while driving home from FUTURES last night: At about 1,500 feet altitude, cruising "low and slow" with elegant power and deep history, was the B17 bomber I planned to visit and photograph with my friend Tom. It was an awesome vision - that flying weapon of the Past.

Sunday: What a long, great morning. Long because I was up at 6:30 a.m. and on the road by 8:15. Long because I had to wait for Tom at a halfway point to be picked up and us take his screaming-fast Mercedes to the rural side of another city to reach their little municipal airport.

Then the fun began.

B-17 !

(For the full photo tour: http://futuresantiques.com/items/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=17589

First of all, WOW. What a presence. Photos are one thing, but let me tell you, it's another creature "in the round".

I love design-thought. I respect design that sets out to meet a goal, and succeeds. This is one reason War Machines interest me - their total lack of nonsense and iffiness.

The B-17(G) was designed for one reason: to more effectively kill those who were trying to kill us. It was not for supply transport, mail delivery, or passenger hauling. It was a 4,800 horsepower flying weapon, bristling with machine guns like needles on a cactus, and ready to drop bombs from its belly to the targets below.

Tom and I walked repeatedly around and under it. We both shot hundreds of photos. We also spoke with other enthusiasts of photography and history, and have swapped emails/websites to see each others shots. Tom and another guy have the mega-equipment, where I was shooting mere "snappers"... but it's all for the love, baby, The Love.

The experience of watching the plane get prepped and fired up was really great too. A crew is needed. One heavy propeller at a time is slowly hand-rotated about 10 revolutions by 2 men to get the oil up and circulated in each of the four the engines before they're started. Then, with gauges checked, and everyone on the ground at a safe distance, one engine at a time is fired up. A huge blast of blue oil-burning smoke pours from the engine pipe and nearly hides view of the plane. Each engine winds up separately in a steely, banging, clattering symphony of exploding fuel and pumping steel. The odor of burning oil and fuel is rich and mysteriously nostalgic. It is the odor of the past... a no-nonsense, balls-to-the-wall*, kill-or-be-killed world effort to halt Evil.

The wind from the props blew my sunglasses (laying on the pavement) away, where another person caught them. I'd just replaced them. I hadn't even noticed. I was totally "focused" on this machine.

When one of the ground crew got all the paying passengers together on the tarmac, I joined just to listen. (The flight over the region was at 150 mph at 1,500 feet altitude - a great, close, slow cruise - but it cost $460., which goes to the maintenance and travels costs of this antique. Unfortunately, neither Tom nor I had anything like $460., so we soaked up all the ground experiences possible.)

"You'll be able to sit in the lucite gunner nose of the plane, at the side machine gun windows, and poke you head up out of the top of the plane from another gun location. Don't wear your hat or sunglasses. They'll be gone. Keep to the thin center boards on the floor. If you step off of them over the bomb doors, you'll drop through and become our bomb. Don't grab the control wires running along the ceiling. Not only could you affect the flying, but they may take your hand off. You cannot fit into the belly pod or the tail gun section." (Smaller men were used for these.)

All passengers had to sign forms releasing the B-17 crew of any responsibility. Tom and I both agreed it'd be much cooler to die in a B-17 crash than be hit by some idiot on a cell phone driving their SUV to the grocery store.

One of the people standing there, also listening but not flying, was a man who politely corrected the speaker a couple of times, explaining he'd been a radio man and gunner on a B-17 in 1944-45 over Germany. HE caught my attention. I wanted to approach him later after all the shots were taken and the plane was gone.......

Once the plane was in the air, I walked over to the older man. I introduced myself, told him I believed it was the B-17 my Father flew in WWII, as a belly gunner..."and, as you can see by my presence, he survived the war." I said "He wouldn't talk about his experiences, and I was hoping you could tell me something about flying these planes at that time over Germany, including what the belly gunner faced."

He was very humble and soft-spoken. His body was old, his eyes an uneven and pale, watery blue. He said: "I was lucky, as were the men I served with. We saw bad things, but I've known men who wouldn't talk about that time... and I suspect it was because they saw more..."

A humble understatement.

He described how cold it was up in that plane at as much as 35,000 feet, even 20,000 feet, and that the radio operator could only wear thin silk gloves because of the delicate knobs he had to manipulate.

He made 9 missions before Germany surrendered. On his last mission, flak took out some of their landing gear. Low on fuel, they had to go to their landing strip with no extra preparation - but they radioed ahead, and "fire retardant foam spray trucks were waiting for us"... "Our fuel was leaking, also." They were a flying bomb. "Our pilot was very good. He took her down over the grass and skidded along the softer ground. The plane broke into pieces, but we all survived."

I asked: "I've heard that the belly turret could actually fall OUT of the plane... with the man inside it. Was this only from being shot and supports breaking, or did the turrets somehow fail on their own?"

"I personally don't know of any falling out, but I can tell you that the hydraulics could be shot up or fail, which was very serious. See, the belly gunner would enter the bubble upside down from inside the plane, then he would spin the bubble around, so he was down "outside" of the plane and sitting upright. If the hydraulics failed, not only was his ability to track enemy planes gone" (he was a fish in a clear barrel) "but he could not get out of the turret. We had hand cranks, and they worked, but it was slow. In emergency crash landings there were times when no one could get the belly gunner out of the turret... and the plane would crash - skid - on its belly... which was on that man."

I've heard some of these turret men had enough time that they asked their up-in-the-plane buddies (by headset) to tell his family his last thoughts were of them...

We talked for about 15 minutes. I was glued to this man's words.

"It was a bad time, but I am grateful for the experiences and having survived them. I wouldn't trade a day and I wouldn't wish them on anyone else," he told me.

Wow. I took his hand, and said "Thank you for talking with me about this, and thank you for what you did."

He said "You're welcome."

I walked away full of emotion.

Ronn.

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* "balls to the wall" meant nothing close to what you've probably thought. It was a WWII term referring to the levers in a war plane. These controls had grip ball handles on the tops, and when you pushed them into maximum position, they were against the "wall" of the pilot panel.