Maggie's Farm

She was around 2000' --the apparant 500' in the pic is me, zooming and expanding in the computer. I got around 20 pix, all backlit by the sky and colorless without tapping the 'saturate' key a few times. Also trying to bring up the nose art --to little avail.

After i'd already put the text on that pic and sent it to family (dad was a WW2 B-17 driver) --and to BD, who copes better with pics that have no horizontal horizon lines --I bing-searched [ b-17 vp ] ... and found a wiki on her, with a pic of her upper surfaces and scroll way down on this incredibly detailed wiki, see her under tow on a runway. here's a dab of quote from the article:



(end quote)

Lesson for me --always have the camera handy. I just happened to, thinking i'd catch a pair of hawks that seem to be nesting back of that hill.

So Saturday i'm running a loud saw, cutting trash junipers, didn't hear the four wright-cyclones, and just happened to look up and just above the further horizon in the notch made by the dirt road i'm parked on, in that brief little piece of sky, about a mile away, what looked like a B-17 sillouhette flying away from me.

i kill the saw, shaking my head, wishing to heck i'd caught a pic of that tiny blob in the distance.

i wander back to the truck where my nikon is stowed and am chugging some iced tea when behind the trees about 90 degrees from where the tiny blob had disappeared, that sound starts rising --and then really rising, fast becoming a roar --those four 2000 hp engines --dropping the tea jug and grabbing the camera, thinking i'm the luckiest B-17-lover in the world, there she came, she had been making a turn over the line of hills where i was, and over the tree line into the little patch of open blue over me, she flew right flat dab over my head!

The wiki referred to a couple times above

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Raiders

contains some links down at the bottom, one of which

http://www.gulfcoastwing.org/

has the dope on how to catch a ride on the pictured B-17G. It do offer a ride in the co-pilot seat, but could be the FAA ruling agin it came later or has a loophole --or the flyers are just (shhhh) ignoring it.

Blert --so glad you asked --you CAN approximate the sound. First you have to be a kid again, with full imagination ready at hand. Then you get right over the bass end of a piano and use both forearms to hit all the bass notes you can cover, white keys and black both at the same time. Hit 'em hard and hold 'em down (no need for the sustain pedal as you're holding themn down) --and as the volume of sound drains away, it sounds like a big formation in the far distance. I can state this with certainty, as i used to do it as a kid, and my dad, who flew an E model until the Me 110s got him on the last day of Big Week and sent him to Stalag Luft 1 for the rest of the war, said so!

--if you look at a map of Texas, run your eye about 50 miles west of Austin and a dab more north of San Antonio, and see the triangle inside three little burgs Dripping Springs, Blanco, and Johnson City (yes named after THAT Johnson family), that's Blanco county, stretched along a line of hills locally-known as the 'devil's backbone'. Up in there, on one o them hills, is where i hide, waiting, watching ....

:-)

After VE day and before VJ day, there was a plan to ship 1000 heavies from England to --i guess it would have been --Okinawa, to fight Japan. One can only imagine how popular that plan was with the 8th AAF combat crews -!

LOL --our poor moms, had to cook dinner and talk fighter aircraft at the same time --

But really, what with all the first-gen Houston/Beaumont wildcatters that bought good grazing land and less heat-humidity in NE Texas, what you saw was probably some old retired eccentric with a producing well or two flying around in his expensive hobby.

--thanks XRay --every time i hear someone deserved something, comes up in mind the best scene in the best western since Ford and Wayne (and Ben Johnson) worked Monument Valley:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lYVggyHRkY

heh --words so few, every one of 'em hits home --as the Kid and the President both learnt --