The Wings of Freedom Tour visits Carroll County.
by James Rada, Jr., photography by Phil Grout
Flying on a B-17 years ago, I realized why the old World War II airmen wore the fleece-lined leather jackets. It gets cold in those old airplanes! They weren’t pressurized like they are now so the higher they climb in altitude, the colder it tends to get inside. In fact, when I inched along a narrow catwalk between two rows of fake, plastic bombs, I could see the ground zooming past me through a crack between the two bomb bay doors.
Although I made the flight a dozen years ago, it is still vivid in my memory. I remember the engines roaring so loud that you could barely speak to someone even if you were standing next to each other. I remember crawling underneath a huge tire that was still slowly rotating on the front landing gear to get to the nose gun. I also remember shaking with claustrophobia while I looked at the tiny opening a gunner had to squeeze through to get into the belly turret.
“We really want to get people to experience living history,” said Josh Vieira with the Collings Foundation.
The Collings Foundations makes sure to give its aircraft plenty of TLC. The foundation runs the Wings of Freedom Tour that visits 110 cities in 35 states annually. Each stop is just a few days to invite visitors out to see the aircraft.
Experiencing living history is just what that flight did for me. I discovered details about air flight during WWII that I’m not sure I could have read in a book because they aren’t things that writers would necessarily think important enough to include.
It is something that residents within a drive of the Carroll County Airport were able to discover for themselves in October. Three WWII-era bombers – a B-17G Flying Fortress, a B-25 Mitchell, a B-24J Liberator – and a fighter (P-51 Mustang) flew into the Carroll County Airport on Oct. 7 to spend the weekend there allowing visitors to tour the planes and take flights on them.
Visitors, young and old, crowded the runways for a chance to climb into one of the bombers. They duck walked through the tight compartments, pretended to fire waist guns out the sides of the plane, or sat in a pilot’s seat pretending to fly the huge bombers.
Ken Nelson brought his young sons, Alex and Matt, out see the planes, and the boys – both under 4 years old – stood in awe of the planes.
“I came with the boys just to see the old airplanes,” Nelson said. “It’s good to see that they can still go up.”
The Collings Foundation planes have personality and names, such as Witchcraft, Nine O Nine, Betty Jane, and Tondelayo. Witchcraft is B-24J that flew 130 missions over Europe during WWII. The B-17 is a heavy bomber that made up backbone of WWII bombing campaigns. The B-25 is a mid-range bomber that gained fame when it was used for the Doolittle Raid. The P-51 is an escort fighter that protected the bombers as they made their runs.
“The crews with the planes start in late January or early February and are basically flying for the next 10 months,” Vieira said.
Each stop draws crowds that tend to be made up of older veterans who flew large bombers such as the ones that landed in Carroll County. They take their pictures and talk about their time in the air and compare it to how it was for the men who flew in these planes.
John Koslosky of Taylorsville brought a friend to the event who wanted to take a ride on one of the planes. Koslosky was happy enough to stay on the ground and watch. He had spent his time in the air from 1946 to 1948 when he flew in B-29s.
“It brings back memories,” Koslosky said. “Comparing the B-29 to these planes, though, is like comparing a Cadillac to Volkswagen. We were in a pressurized plane and that made a big difference.”
The Wings of Freedom Tour is now in its 26th year and it continues to attract WWII veterans who want to remember their younger years, but the numbers of veterans showing up is shrinking as time takes them.
“We love to have them come out and talk about our planes, but we’re only seeing about one WWII veteran per stop nowadays,” Vieira said.
The mantle has been passed to younger veterans who flew in better aircraft. They can appreciate their planes better now, seeing what could have been.
“If we get one person who isn’t familiar with this history of WWII to come out and learn more, we consider it a huge success,” Vieira said.
For more information about the Collings Foundation and the Wings of Freedom tour, visit their web site at www.collingsfoundation.org. You will also find a calendar of where the cities where the tour will be stopping.
