Hey! Aluminum Overcast showing her lovely self on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DcfyWaD0vQ
A B-17G, the model with the chin turret is lumbering the local Skies. The rich, deep, song of Wright R-1820 Cyclone engines from this siren who is a remnant of a fleet of 12,726 rugged legends. A third of which were lost in combat in WW II.
As I gaze a the sight of her brilliantly silver aluminum skin slowly passing low under the perpetual overcast Oregon sky the drizzle takes on the reverence of holy water as it emanates from the same place this bird soars.
It represents America of another era, a day when most of the wealth of the nation was distributed far more evenly. A day when everyone sacrificed for the cause and all niches of the social strata served in the Armed Forces to take on an incredibly horrible evil with global hegemony in mind.
Where has that land of plenty with such a 'can do' and indomitable spirit gone. She is a comforting sight being such an icon of high status, but she is an orphan in so many ways sadness is felt concurrently with the joy of having an old friend visit unexpectedly.
She flies over a land where the rich and powerful's kids don't bleed in the dirty little wars they conduct with hegemony and bleeding tax dollars from the beast in mind. She is ties down at night in a land where people increasingly do not know each other, where visiting neighbors on each other's porches has morphed into people hiding from each other behind locked door, as the ghostly lights rom the ever present glass tit of the TV plays on living room windows all along streets in al of suburbia.
I take the sight of a craft like this as a good omen. It reminds me of a boy who talked to the planes as they flew overhead, who took the dreams they gave him onto the Navy as a pilot in the Pacific Theater in the conflict Aluminum Overcast was born into. Who later used to buzz 6 Brook Lane, North Branford, Connecticut in the company's Cessna 310, with wings wagging.
This man, Dan McCarthy would love the sight I enjoy today here in Eugene and saw this morning when I toured her at the Eugene Airport. It would be a living thing to him too as full of enchantment and magic as it is to me.
I count my blessings, that I can see this lady of the sky and know her heritage and heart of a Flying Fortress. For what will be the ambivalent and aching thoughts of the kids now the age I was in the 1950s who live to turn 50 and see relics of the age when their country, The North American Union was still the United States of America, with the deadly cancer of neocon fascism growing in her belly intent on her death.
Relics that represent the beginning of the end, when forces that once fought fascism had become tools to promote fascism and be used to advance global dominance. I don't envy them, and I wish I could hear Daniel, my father's perspective and thoughts.
I hope these birds of the 'Great Generation' who fought WW II keep flying for people to see and remember stay in the sky long into that sad future, to give the kids of today turned into the grim and tasked for survival people in their fifties the same reminder I have today, that things were not always as bad as they are today, and that the silver wings of an Angel always bring hope and inspiration to say, 'why not.' Why not imagine fighting back and winning, imagine returning things to they way they should be.
This is allot of hope to load on birds so old and primitive next to today's war birds. But they, like the American people can do the impossible and difficult.
Which is why they are an icon of the best of us all to me.
"Fly, pretty, bird, fly," said the Connecticut farm boy once long ago. "Fly sweet princess, fly," says his son, a Cessna 310 seen only in his mind's eye, flying ghostly at her wing as she majestically soars overhead. You are Felicity so badly needed, a representative of the summer of hope which maybe never was, captured and preserved. When we hear you sing and dance in a sky sadly overcast, Unicorns become possible again as old magic of another time and place is remembered.
Thank you. You and those who flew you will never be forgotten.
http://www.b17.org
http://www.registerguard.com/news/2007/05/18/d1.cr.b17.0518.p1.php