A relic is a personal item of someone of religious significance. That's what Wiki says anyway. I don't know if anyone of religious significance owned the B-24 that I rode on but I know my ride was religiously significant. Not that any of the major religions would agree with my assessment but I don't care. Things lined up too perfectly to make this little event a reality for there not to be some sort of Divine intervention.
It costs a fair chunk of change to ride on a B-24. It's the only one in the entire world still able to use its wings for their intended purpose as airfoils and engine mounts. That fact makes the supply side of the economics very favorable for the current owner of Witchcraft. Yup! $425 for a half hour flight per person. It sounded a little expensive to me too until I found out that it costs about $4000 per hour to fly the plane. That's a burdened cost that includes maintenance and such. I didn't buy just one ticket to ride either. I bought two and took my Dad along.
Dad didn't have a clue what was happening until about ten minutes before we boarded Witchcraft. Mom did one heckuva job keeping the secret and getting Dad up here for the event. Quite a few other family members made the trip too. I think they wanted to see, firsthand, the expression on Dad's face after the flight.
We were pre-flighted by a young man a little too cantankerous for his age. It was funny though. He told us which places were safe to walk and which weren't. The bomb bay doors were definitely not safe to step on and he told us that if we did we would probably make an immediate exit from the aircraft. If we did make an unscheduled exit from the aircraft he let us know that he would be sure to forget that he ever saw us.
We entered the aircraft through the bomb bay doors. They must have made people smaller 60 years ago because it was a pretty tight fit getting back into the waist gunners' area. Our "seats" faced backwards and the seat belts were authentic vintage. I'm not sure they would have done much good if they had been needed.
Before we knew it, we were taxied out to the runway, the engines revved full with the brakes on, then released and off we went.
The "WOOOOO HOOOO!!!!" in that video is me and it's my trademark phrase. Everyone else must have been in complete awe or something. I was too but I had to let a little of it out or I was going to spontaneously combust. That prolly would have been a new one for our pre-flight dude to explain. The high pitched noise at the end of the video is the bell signaling that we were allowed to get up and move about the cabin. There were no seat backs or tray tables to worry about.
The flight was uneventful, in any bad sense of that phrase. In every good sense it was fully eventful. We wandered from the tip of the tail gunner's spot to the bombardier's spot and all points in between. The catwalk through the bomb bay was very narrow and a little nerve wracking to negotiate.
The flight itself is pretty much a blur. That's got to be just about the fastest thirty minutes I've experienced. The pictures and video that I took are all pretty crappy but I was too excited to think much about framing everything nice and proper-like. The view from behind the pilots is probably one of my favorites of the videos that I took.It was really too soon when the bell rang again and informed us that we had to try and strap ourselves back in with the authentic vintage seat belts. If you listen and watch closely you can hear the tires touch the runway again and see some of their rubber turned to smoke:
Dad talked about the whole thing for the rest of the day. "I never thought I'd ever get to take a ride on a plane like that!" The smile that lasted the rest of the day and on occasion the next day was worth far more than the money I paid. As a friend of mine told me -- "It's only money. You can't eat it." Fifty bucks in gas for Mom and Dad to drive up here and back home. $850 for the ride itself. The memories of July 4, 2007. Priceless.
The link to the first video (Blogger only allows up to 100 mB embedded in the blog) will have links to all the other videos from the ride on the right hand side of that page. The pictures I took are here.
