On this Memorial Day weekend 2015, I wanted to share a very cool, and very rare, experience I had two weeks ago.
A coalition of groups that maintain and fly vintage WWII aircraft helped organize a flyover on the National Mall of just about every still flyable piece of vintage metal we’ve got.
I was angry at myself for not hearing about, nor planning my day adequately, to get my ass down to the Mall to see it in person – since I had assembled many of these airplanes as plastic models while a kid – when I heard a noise overhead at my house, some 45 miles to the west of downtown D.C.
And there it was… the roar of freedom. Plane, after plane, after plane. I got a small sample of them with the video camera.
3 Comments
Dave
You haven’t lived until a B-17 Flying Fortress has buzzed your suburban home. Okay, so “buzz” isn’t the right word. It sounded like steel girders being fed into a giant pencil sharpener. An awesome 4th of July moment when they had a vintage aircraft show at the New Hampshire airstrip near my house. The sound was probably as fearsome a weapon as the bombs and guns.
HozelRockit
I was really disappointed that I didn’t hear about this until the day before. I would have loved to have done down town and watched this.
I still remember being at the victory parade after the first Gulf War. I am not sure which was more awesome. The stealth fly over to start it off (they were still seldom seen novelties back then) or the low flyover by the giant lumbering B-52 Stratofortress.
Chad
Very cool…imagine hearing and seeing the sky filled with these hulking beasts!