The unmistakable roar of US warplanes that helped the Allies win World War II was to thunder over Washington yesterday to mark the 70th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat.
From 12:10pm, for 45 minutes, 56 restored “warbirds” were to fly in formation down the Potomac River, past the Lincoln Memorial and over the National Mall, the nation’s symbolic front lawn.
Up to 10,000 people were expected to watch the spectacle — including 300 to 500 of the last surviving veterans of the 1939-1945 conflict that the US entered in December 1941 with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Photo: AFP
The world’s only flying B-29 bomber, similar to those that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is among the participating aircraft, which also include nearly a dozen types of fighters including the P-51 Mustang, a posse of naval dive bombers, training planes and a Consolidated PBY Catalina flying boat.
It took months to plan the flyover — and to get permission from a security-obsessed US government to fly through what has been, since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a virtual no-fly zone.
“You can only imagine what it took to pull this together,” said Steve Brown, CEO of the Commemorative Air Force, a non-profit that restores, maintains and flies 162 vintage warplanes across the US.
“We’re pulling off what we consider to be a minor miracle,” he said at rural Culpeper airport, southwest of Washington, a staging post for yesterday’s carefully choreographed Victory in Europe Day event.
All of the aircraft, bar a Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber with a brake fault, took to the Virginia skies on Thursday to rehearse formation flying and sort out last-minute communication issues.
Back on the ground, volunteers in period coveralls painted black-and-white stripes onto a dark C-53 Skytrooper in a nod to the transporters from which US paratroopers jumped into France on D-Day in 1944.
Overhead, the B-29 bomber, which goes by the name Fifi, flew by at 150m, a lumbering presence amid a speedy triplet of Mustangs.
Taking it all in was Jerry Yellin, 91, who as a Mustang pilot flew in the last US air combat mission of the war, on Aug. 14, 1945, strafing a Japanese air base outside Tokyo.
“When we got back to Iwo Jima, we found out that, while we had been strafing, the war had been over for three hours,” Yellin said, looking sharp in his US Army Air Corps captain’s uniform.
So complex is the flyover that Washington’s Reagan National Airport, across the Potomac from the National Mall, is to suspend operations for an hour to enable it to proceed in safety.
“From a pilot’s perspective, it’s very scripted,” Dan Gleason said in the cockpit of a second C-47 that spent much of its post-war life doing missionary work in Colombia before its restoration as a staff plane for high-ranking officers.
“Each flight crew is going to be really tuned in on getting their airplane in the air at the right time, in the right airspace, in the right configuration — all the time looking out for other aircraft in the air,” he told reporters.
The flyover is to roughly follow the same route over the National Mall used last month by a Florida postal worker who slipped undetected into Washington airspace and landed a one-seat gyrocopter outside the Capitol, where he was arrested.
By coincidence, that pilot, Doug Hughes, was to appear in US District Court later yesterday for a preliminary hearing on charges that include violating national defense airspace.
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