Liberty Foundation offers rides in B-17 bomber

Editor’s note: This article contains opinion.

To see Earth through the tiny glass window of a Boeing 747 is one thing.

To see Earth by sticking your head through a hole in the roof of a 1945 B-17 bomber climbing into the sky at 150 mph is something else altogether.

A scream-for-joy, heart-racing, never-forget experience.

Unless I take up sky-diving, my flight Monday aboard the “Liberty Belle” is as close as I’ll ever come to a bird’s eye view of this world.

It happened when Fremont Tribune photographer Matt Gade and I met Scott Maher at Tac Air FBO at Eppley Airfield in Omaha. Maher is the founder and director of the Liberty Foundation, a Tulsa, Okla,-based, non-profit organization which maintains and flies the Liberty Belle to cities across America where people can walk about, climb aboard and ride in a plane known during World War II as a “Flying Fortress.”

“We get a lot of veterans who want to fly one more mission,” Maher said. “They get in and they’re 18 and 19 all over again.”

The Liberty Belle, built in August 1945 near the end of the war, never flew in combat. But thousands of other B-17’s did. American workers produced more than 12,730 of the bombers between 1935 and May 1945. Of those, nearly 5,000 were lost in combat.

Maher said the Liberty Foundation’s mission is to remind Americans of the courage of the countless crews who flew bombing missions during World War II, and to remember those airmen who never came home.

As Maher ushered us into the Liberty Belle, I spotted dozens of names scribbled on the inside of the green metal door.

“Those are names of veterans who have flown with us,” Maher said.

We found seats and settled in as Maher handed out ear plugs and told us to buckle our seat belts. There were 10 of us in all — me and Matt, five other reporters and cameramen, Maher, and the two pilots, John Bode and Ray Fowler.

Ten of us, I thought, just like the crews that flew these planes more than 60 years ago.

Looking about, I realized Matt and I were in the radio compartment, with thousands of rivets stamped into the ceiling and walls, and two black boxes covered with dials and connectors. And overhead, a clear shot to the wild blue yonder.

Yes, the window above us had been removed, allowing fresh air into the plane and, as we were soon to find out, a view we never imagined.

As the Liberty Belle taxied out onto the runway, I looked back at the two newsmen seated in the waist gunner section, and up ahead at two more crowded into the navigator’s room. I thought of the young men of that long ago war who buckled into seats just like this, imagining what lay ahead, and I wondered what it was like to fly mission after bombing mission, and to depend on the talents of every crew member to get the job done and get home.

The Liberty Belle rumbled down the runway and we lifted into the Nebraska sky.

Within seconds, Maher appeared in the doorway, giving up a thumbsnup to indicate we were free to move about the plane.

I stood up and immediately stuck my head through the opening overhead.

Now I know why people sky-dive.

To see the world unobstructed from that altitude — I was so excited, I forgot to ask Maher exactly how high we were — is a beautiful thing. Green, green and brown, green, brown and blue. The scope of the city, the curvature of the fields, the snaking of river and of highway.

Unobstructed, an angel’s view.

We took it in, our grins as wide as the lens the photographers used to mark the moment.

Like children on a playground, we scrambled about the interior of the Liberty Belle, tight-roping the catwalk across the bomb bay, up to the cockpit where Bode and Fowler flew us north from Omaha.

Matt headed for the bombardier’s station in the nose of the aircraft, for a front-row look at what lay ahead. I retreated to the waist section with its two 50-caliber machine guns. Sitting for a moment on a wooden ammunition box, I stared out the window, the exuberance from my earlier open-air view quietly fading.

I imagined the bombing runs, the hundreds of planes just like this one, flying in formation to Berlin. The gunners in the ball turret and the tail scrambling to ward off attacking ME110s. The radio operator sending word that two of four engines were failing.

I remembered the words of a pilot who’d flown a damaged B-17 back to England after a mission over Ausburg, Germany.

“We fell back from the formation, but not too far, and we were barely able to keep up,” he’d said. “We were afraid we’d become a straggler and then German fighters would attack us like vultures.”

Looking out the window of the Liberty Belle, I thought about that.

When the plane landed, with more bump than you’d feel on a newer aircraft, we all climbed out. Matt had taken more than 250 photos.

He knew, as I did, opportunities like that don’t just land at your doorstep.

I thanked Maher aloud for the great ride.

And in my heart, I thanked all those veterans.

If you go

Liberty Foundation is bringing the historic B-17 bomber, “Liberty Belle,” to Nebraska.

Half-hour flights aboard the “Liberty Belle” are available from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday at Tac Air FBO, 3737 Orville Plaza at Eppley Airfield in Omaha.

The cost is $395 for Liberty Foundation members and $430 for non-members. Ground tours of the aircraft are also available.

Reservations can be made by calling Scott Mayer, Liberty Foundation director, at (918) 340-0243 or at smaher@libertyfoundation.org .