On the Trail of the B17: Visiting Historic US Air Force Sites
On the Trail of the B17: Visiting Historic US Air Force Sites - Finding a Flying Fortress on Display
Finding a B-17 Flying Fortress on display is a key part of following the trail of this legendary aircraft. While over 12,000 were originally built, tracing one down today reveals a much scarcer landscape. Only around 45 complete airframes survive globally, with the vast majority residing in museums, thankfully saved from the scrapyard or less glamorous fates.
These museum pieces offer a tangible link to the past. Places like the National Museum of the United States Air Force are notable stops, often featuring aircraft that required years, even a decade, of painstaking restoration by dedicated teams to return them to display condition. It’s a reminder of the sheer effort involved in preserving such large, complex machines. You might encounter variants that served in unexpected roles too, like drone directors after their bombing days were done.
Seeing one up close lets you appreciate the scale and complexity of the design, a marvel of its time. While incredibly few are still airworthy today – seeing one actually take to the sky is a very rare spectacle – the grounded examples still convey a sense of the era and the immense industrial and human effort they represent. Visiting these sites is a destination in itself for anyone interested in this pivotal piece of aviation history.
As you track down the surviving examples of the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, often found in climate-controlled hangars or occasionally sitting outdoors on airport ramps, a few observations might strike you as noteworthy from an engineering or historical perspective:
1. Consider the sheer scale of production during the war; over twelve thousand of these aircraft rolled off the assembly lines. Visiting a museum and seeing one or two, it's humbling to realize just how few remain – likely well under one percent of the total built. The vast majority were simply scrapped after their service lives, a fate common for wartime machinery deemed obsolete or surplus.
2. Look closely at the airframe's skin, especially on aircraft displayed outside. The ubiquitous aluminum alloy, while revolutionary for its time, wasn't entirely immune to the elements. Surface oxidation and even deeper corrosion are constant battles, necessitating rigorous maintenance and sometimes specialized protective coatings, derived from modern aerospace developments, just to slow down the material's inevitable deterioration.
3. Speaking with restoration teams reveals a fascinating challenge: working without complete sets of original documentation. Many B-17 restorations involve what amounts to reverse engineering; fabricating parts by meticulously measuring and analyzing existing components or even pieces recovered from crash sites. It's a complex process demanding deep technical skill and ingenuity to reconstruct lost manufacturing data.
4. If you ever have the rare opportunity to witness one of the few airworthy B-17s start its engines, brace yourself. The characteristic rumble of the four radial powerplants is incredible, but the noise levels up close are substantial. Sound pressure can easily exceed dangerous thresholds, serving as a visceral reminder of the intense, high-noise environment the flight crews routinely endured, often with limited or no hearing protection.
5. Reflect on how these aircraft navigated global conflicts before the age of satellite positioning. Bombing missions deep into enemy territory relied on remarkable human skill, using celestial navigation, dead reckoning based on airspeed and wind drift, and visual pilotage. Compared to the instantaneous, sub-meter accuracy offered by GPS on virtually any contemporary device, the precision achieved with those older methods was a significant accomplishment.
What else is in this post?
- On the Trail of the B17: Visiting Historic US Air Force Sites - Finding a Flying Fortress on Display
- On the Trail of the B17: Visiting Historic US Air Force Sites - Exploring Former Training Bases and Fields
- On the Trail of the B17: Visiting Historic US Air Force Sites - Tracking Specific B-17 Histories
- On the Trail of the B17: Visiting Historic US Air Force Sites - Planning a Journey to See These Aircraft
On the Trail of the B17: Visiting Historic US Air Force Sites - Exploring Former Training Bases and Fields
Exploring the former training bases and fields where B-17 crews learned their demanding craft offers a different perspective on the Flying Fortress story. Scattered across the United States, locations such as Lewistown and Great Falls in Montana, Wendover in Utah, Sebring in Florida, and Madras in Oregon were essentially temporary cities dedicated to preparing airmen for combat. Visiting these sites today reveals a variety of outcomes – some retain echoes of their military past with surviving structures, others have been significantly repurposed, like Sebring becoming a raceway, demonstrating the changing landscape. Tracking down these locations across different regions provides a journey into the sheer scale of the wartime training effort and the vast distances crews traveled even before heading overseas. While some bases are now quiet fields or small civilian airports, others offer historical markers or even small museums, reminding you of the intensive, round-the-clock training that unfolded there, a critical stage in the B-17's path to the skies over Europe and beyond.
Venturing beyond the museum hangar doors, the landscapes where B-17 crews honed their demanding skills offer a different kind of historical exploration. These expansive former training bases and auxiliary fields, often selected for their remoteness and favorable flying conditions, hold fascinating, sometimes unexpected, legacies. Here are a few observations from exploring these ground-level sites:
Consider the physical footprint left behind by these training fields. Their original requirement for expansive, level ground – ideal for flight operations – has, perhaps unexpectedly, made them prime candidates for post-military development. Today, this land often represents valuable real estate, eyed for everything from large-scale logistics centers (think warehouses feeding transportation networks) to housing tracts. This transformation underscores a persistent pattern: strategic transportation hubs, whether military or civilian, often drive surrounding economic activity and land value. It's a fascinating transition from wartime necessity to modern economic driver, occasionally influencing the surrounding infrastructure that supports commercial air travel as well.
Shifting focus to the environmental legacy, investigative studies at these former sites frequently uncover residual contamination in the soil. The prevalent use of leaded fuels and certain maintenance chemicals decades ago has left a footprint of heavy metals and hydrocarbons. Addressing this requires complex and costly remediation efforts before the land can be safely repurposed for civilian use. This silent consequence of past operations highlights a long-term environmental engineering challenge and can be a complicating factor when assessing potential sites for new infrastructure projects, including expansions or developments linked to civilian transportation networks.
Interestingly, the physical characteristics that made these locations suitable for B-17 training – vast, uncluttered airspace – are finding a new relevance today. Many undeveloped or partially repurposed former airfields have become informal proving grounds for the next generation of aviation technology: unmanned aerial vehicles. The open space provides excellent conditions for flight testing and development, from hobbyist activities to more complex operational trials for various drone applications. It's a stark contrast: the thunder of heavy bombers replaced by the hum of electric rotors, yet the fundamental requirement for clear skies remains.
A significant, yet often overlooked, legacy lies in the architectural and operational blueprints themselves. The fundamental design principles developed for military airfields – specifications for runway length and load-bearing capacity, taxiway widths, and field layouts necessary for handling large, multi-engine aircraft – directly informed the standards for early civilian airports. The foundational infrastructure supporting global commercial air travel today, from major international hubs down to smaller regional fields, owes a significant debt to the engineering requirements established during this era of rapid military aviation expansion.
Finally, exploring the human dimension, historical research and occasional archaeological digs at these sites can reveal fascinating details about the lives of the personnel stationed there. Beyond the flight logs and technical manuals, evidence sometimes surfaces of resourceful culinary practices. Stationed often in remote locales, crews and support staff creatively supplemented standard issue rations, incorporating local wild edibles or produce into their diets. These glimpses into wartime sustenance offer a unique, ground-level perspective on the daily challenges and adaptations required far from the combat zones, providing a different kind of historical 'taste' of the era.
On the Trail of the B17: Visiting Historic US Air Force Sites - Tracking Specific B-17 Histories
Delving into the specific history of a particular B-17 goes beyond simply locating one in a museum; it's about uncovering the individual life it led. Each Flying Fortress that survived carried its own unique saga, shaped by the dozens or hundreds of missions it flew and the hundreds of airmen who served aboard over its career. Piecing together these narratives often requires serious detective work, sifting through archived operational records, missing air crew reports, and sometimes, if you are fortunate, finding veterans' personal accounts or unit histories that shed light on specific moments. This process reveals fascinating details – some aircraft became famous for surviving many combat tours like achieving a milestone number of missions, others had less dramatic but equally important roles like training or support, and a few even had unexpected second lives after the war in civilian or other military service branches. The reality is that tracking down the complete, verified story for any single B-17 is challenging; records can be patchy, often fragmented across different archives, meaning the full truth of many aircraft's operational lives will likely remain elusive. Yet, knowing even snippets of a B-17's personal journey – a harrowing mission it flew, a notable crew member, or simply the diverse places it served – profoundly deepens the connection when standing before one today.
Tracking the individual journeys of B-17s adds fascinating layers, revealing connections that sometimes bridge the past with contemporary realities, including how we travel today. From an analytical standpoint, digging into the records and physical remnants can yield surprising insights:
Investigating the operational logs and flight plans of these aircraft sometimes uncovers routes surprisingly close to corridors heavily trafficked by commercial airlines now. While modern navigation is entirely different, the fundamental efficiencies of following prevailing winds or navigating certain geographic features meant some historical flight paths, particularly over oceans, align remarkably with those optimized by carriers today for fuel efficiency and reduced flight time. It underscores how basic aeronautical principles persist across generations of flight technology.
It's intriguing to note that material scientists occasionally revisit the properties of the aluminum alloys prevalent in B-17 construction. While obviously not cutting-edge by today's standards, studying their performance characteristics under stress and fatigue over decades can still offer data points relevant to understanding material longevity. Sometimes, insights from these older formulations even inform considerations for certain less critical components in modern aircraft interiors, perhaps balancing weight and cost requirements. Whether this is genuinely innovative or merely rediscovering established limits is debatable.
Some former B-17 operational airfields have, through various evolutions, found new life supporting aspects of modern civilian air travel. While the intensive training operations are long gone, the cleared land and existing runway infrastructure, if maintained or upgraded, have occasionally been repurposed. A few serve as smaller regional airports, and in rare cases, sections of the land or adjacent facilities might support ancillary functions for nearby larger hubs, perhaps even offering simplified ramp space or facilities utilized occasionally for transient aircraft needing a brief stop or layover, a far cry from their wartime purpose.
Pinpointing the precise fate of some aircraft, especially those lost in remote areas, leads you down paths that are more challenging than a typical tourist itinerary. Visiting specific crash sites, particularly those officially recognized as memorials and situated in wilderness or difficult-to-access terrain, demands preparation. Standard travel insurance often proves insufficient for these kinds of excursions. Exploring such sites often necessitates specialized policies covering potential search and rescue or medical evacuation from isolated locations, a practical consideration for history enthusiasts seeking out these specific, often poignant, destinations.
Finally, the market for artifacts salvaged from documented and legal recovery efforts related to B-17s illustrates an interesting economic phenomenon. Items, especially unique or serialized components that tie directly to a specific aircraft's history, have become highly sought after by collectors. The scarcity of these tangible links to the past means that the value per gram of certain well-preserved or historically significant parts can, perhaps unexpectedly, reach or even exceed the market price of precious metals. It reflects not just the material itself, but the intense historical and emotional weight placed upon these remnants of a critical era.
On the Trail of the B17: Visiting Historic US Air Force Sites - Planning a Journey to See These Aircraft
Considering a journey to seek out these remarkable B-17 Flying Fortresses? As of mid-2025, planning such a trip has a few new wrinkles worth noting. While the iconic aircraft remain largely in their established museum homes, the practicalities of reaching them continue to shift. We're seeing persistent adjustments in regional flight networks – some smaller airports near historic sites might suddenly gain, or frustratingly lose, direct connections, potentially adding layovers and complexity to what might otherwise seem a straightforward travel plan. This highlights the perennial challenge for enthusiasts venturing beyond major gateways. Furthermore, as specific historical tourism gains traction, especially online, expect to find more curated information available, but also be aware that popular sites, particularly during peak travel times, might necessitate booking accommodations and museum entry further in advance than perhaps needed a few years prior. It's a subtle but noticeable shift in managing expectations for what was once perhaps a more spontaneous undertaking.
Planning a trip with the goal of visiting specific B-17 aircraft scattered across various locations reveals several practical considerations rooted in logistical and technological realities as of mid-2025.
Observe that digital twinning technologies, leveraging techniques like high-resolution photogrammetry or 3D scanning of the physical aircraft, are now creating virtual representations. This allows for remote access; one can 'walk around' and examine the external structure and potentially the interior spaces of a B-17 via a headset or screen, bypassing the complexities and costs of physical travel. While it doesn't replicate the sensory experience – the smell of oil, the touch of cold metal – it provides detailed visual access to dimensions and layouts, useful for study or remote visitation, and certainly simplifies the logistical planning associated with reaching the actual dispersed physical locations.
A notable development involves leveraging the expansive, often underutilized tarmac and service areas at certain former airbases. Some are being equipped with charging infrastructure to support electric vehicle fleets. This infrastructure repurposing, driven by energy distribution logistics considerations and land availability, facilitates combined lodging and local transport packages. From a planning perspective, this bundles aspects of local movement (which, outside major hubs, can be a challenge) into the site visit itself, offering a slightly more contained, arguably convenient, approach to navigating the surrounding areas, although the environmental net benefit compared to simply using a modern internal combustion rental often warrants closer analysis.
Integrated travel logistics are appearing. Some carriers or aggregated travel platforms are combining flight itineraries with accommodation and entry arrangements for specific museum or historical site clusters. These packages simplify trip planning by consolidating booking points, often incorporating timed access slots or curated tours. It represents an operational alignment between the transportation sector and heritage tourism, streamlining the path from passenger origin to destination site, although the actual value proposition of such bundles, compared to independent booking, necessitates individual evaluation based on itinerary specifics. The "behind the scenes" might just be standard staff areas rebranded.
Exploring remote crash sites, particularly those in difficult terrain previously requiring extensive ground or aerial surveys, is seeing methodological shifts due to unmanned aerial systems (UAS). Drones equipped with high-resolution cameras or mapping sensors can conduct initial reconnaissance flights, providing valuable data on site condition, accessibility routes (or lack thereof), and preliminary location verification from a safe distance. While this technology significantly alters the initial investigation and planning phase for attempting a physical visit, it does not diminish the fundamental logistical challenges or safety considerations inherent in traversing remote, undeveloped landscapes. It's an information-gathering tool, not a replacement for arduous physical navigation.
A less expected output from B-17 preservation efforts involves leveraging design documentation and salvaged material in creative projects. Original technical drawings are being referenced for fabricating items outside aerospace – often furniture or decorative pieces. Likewise, non-structural components or surplus material from restoration, if ethically sourced, find their way into unique goods. This provides a marginal revenue stream for restoration projects, linking the technical history to tangible products. From a traveler's perspective, it presents opportunities for acquiring distinctive items associated with the aircraft's legacy, available often at or near the preservation sites, bridging the gap between technical artifact and accessible memento.