I would have given a left !@# to see that B47 fly under a bridge. (I always liked the F-101, also)
340 Boy...
bet you would have loved to be in my shoes when I was in high school...I am originally from No Virginia... and was an airplane buff from about 11 years old... besides living in England for 3 years as a kid, being around all of these old WW 2 bases, that Nato still had opened in case war ever broke out...I went to school on one base that had a skeleton crew to keep it functional.. RAF Molesworth...had B 17s there with the 303rd BG in WW2...there were still a few B 17 body parts around at a junkyard area on base.. we kids use to go play on and around given the chance... the control tower and the airfield was left readily available to be operational in about 48 hrs if needed...miles of the old Nissan huts were standing, that had been boarded up when the war ended...
my Jr high requested of the Air Force to let us have the old briefing room for a squadron as an auditorium... so they did in 1965....it was to be cleaned up by our gym class in the winter, when it was raining all the time.. our school at the time was like 75 to 80% girls.. so it was assigned to the boys gym class...
when we went in there to clean it up, it had been locked up for 20 years, since 1945... dark, full of dust, half the lights didn't work...
it was like a movie theatre..with the floor sloping down toward the stage... behind the stage was a curtain and a big wall behind it...we cleaned this place up every day for a couple of weeks..
when we pulled the curtain back from the wall, on the wall was a large map of NW and Northern Europe.... still marked and hanging on the wall, were all the information for the flight crew briefings on the last bomber mission flown from Molesworth by the 303rd in 1945....
for those of us that were aviation buffs, we freaked out when the school wanted it all torn down... or gym coach was a WW 2 gunner on a B 17, and he was thrilled so many of us boys were taking it all in...however the school won and the map was taken down and the curtain taken down and washed... as it was full of dust... I'll continue this on a new post..
What a discovery for a young airplane lover. Thanks for sharing, Seafire.
"For joy of knowing what may not be known we take the golden road to Samarkand." James Elroy Flecker
