2001-08-07 - 12:08 a.m.

The Air Show

So, what have I been up to in the last week? Well, lots of trying to do as little as possible, certainly. Between the heinous stress level of my job, recent travel, and busy weekends, I've still been unable to do much more than sit on the couch when I finally get home. Hence, no entries.

The highlight of my weekend was a trip to the Yankee Air Force's "Gathering of Fighters 2001". In case the name didn't tip you off, GoF is an aircraft exhibition. There quite a few fighters there, but a number of other old birds as well. I've read so much about the air battles of WWII that this was a religious experience for me. I tried to explain it to Julie, but I don't think she really felt what I was getting at.

One major crowd-pleaser was the "scenario flight", where the field turned on an old air raid siren and an old Army fighter plane made pursuing motions at a replica of a Japanese dive-bomber. Both birds were beautiful, and wowed the crowd, but it left me a little cold. I've played flight sims and read a lot about air combat, and I could see that those pilots weren't flying real combat maneuvers. That's no shame to them- their aircraft are irreplacable, after all, and combat flying would be a stupid risk for them to take. But it put a lot of strain on my imagination.

The bird that moved me the most was the old B-17. It was a war model, though it never saw combat, and seeing it fly it was easy to imagine what it might have been like to be in England in 1944, watching hundreds of such planes flying off to bomb the Reich. Coming close enough to touch it, I couldn't help but think about a time when this aircraft was the most amazing thing anyone had ever seen.

Almost sixty years ago, 11 guys fresh out of various Army Air Corps schools would have been assigned to a plane like that. They'd have flown it over the Atlantic to England, and landed in an air base that was a quiet farm ten months before. They're get to know each other, trust each other with their lives, and in a disturbingly high proportion of the cases, they'd die somewhere over France or Germany.

All that happened in B-17s just like the "Yankee Lady". Saturday I got to touch her and hear her fly. I felt very lucky indeed.

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