Rare Second World War bomber takes flight in Calgary

As the pilot fired up the propellor engines, the smell of thick smoke filled the cabin and the entire aircraft started to jitter and shake; it was clear that I wasn’t in your average cushy jetliner.

Much the opposite, I was strapped into a rigid mesh seat and surrounded by machine guns in a B-17 Flying Fortress, a bomber from the Second World War, with a bare bones military interior to match.

The aircraft is giant and graceful from the outside, but stepping inside was like walking into a flying time capsule. Racks of fake bombs in the bomb bay were within view of our seats, and provided an ominous reminder of what kind of damage this plane could do when it was commissioned.

The bomb bay on Aluminum Overcast, a B17 Flying Fortress at the Springbank Airport outside Calgary.

Yet, on a smooth sloping flight with the Rockies in the background, it was hard to imagine that in another time, this same plane would’ve been making a perilous journey for a crew of young men about to drop bombs over Germany.

The engines screamed and air buffeted through the cabin throughout the flight in a strangely calm way in flight, although you could just imagine that calm being shattered by the sounds of flak guns and enemy aircraft whizzing by during an air raid.

‘Fortress’ seems like the right word for the plane. Aside from being cramped inside, the plane has 13 massive .50 caliber guns pointing in every angle, making it feel more like a warship in the air than just any old airplane. The plane was the main bomber used by U.S troops in the Second World War, and over 12,000 were built.

While the sheer amount of machine guns is what distinguished the Flying Fortress from the RAF’s Halifax and Lancaster bombers, not all of those machine guns were in comfortable positions. On the underbelly, a glass bubble housed a gun that required even an extremely short person to be in the fetal position for the entire duration of their 10 hour flights.

Most of the crews didn’t survive either. Knocking on the shell of the airplane from the inside, you could feel that the thin metal plating wouldn’t do much to stop enemy fire. With a cruise speed of under 200 miles an hour, the massive formations suffered equally massive losses from enemy fighter planes.

Yet for us, flying over 70 years after the particular model was built, our biggest discomfort was the occasional dramatic drop or gain of altitude as our pilot wrestled with the heavy controls.

“There’s a sense of responsibility every time you get in it. There’s not that many (B-17’s) flying, so you really don’t want to screw it up,” said Lorraine Morris, pilot of the aircraft along with her husband Ken.

Lorraine flies Boeing 777 passenger planes for United Airlines as her day job, but said that the lack of electronic steering and the plane being steered by the rear wheel when on the ground makes flying the Fortress a challenge.

Ninety-four-year-old Canadian World War II veteran Doug Curtis stands with pilots Ken and Lorraine Morris after a flight in Aluminum Overcast, a B-17 Flying Fortress, at Springbank Airport outside Calgary on Wednesday, June 22, 2016. 

“It’s totally different, it’s like the difference between a stick shift and an automatic, in that, if you learn on a stick shift, an automatic’s no big deal,” Lorraine explained. She says she’d let anybody who could fly a B-17 fly her intercontinental 777.

Part of the reason she gets to fly the plane is because she has so many flight hours under her belt, a harsh difference from the young pilot’s in their 20’s who were slapped onto these machines with little experience.

The EAA has those veterans and their families in mind when they put on flying tours with this plane. The Flying Fortress tours across North America to give veterans a chance to connect and their families the chance to appreciate what they did during the war.

To experience the flight yourself, you can buy tickets on b17.org, but on the 26th, the plane will be leaving to Winnipeg, continuing across North America.

Who knows how much longer these historic machines will be flying.