All weekend I've been hearing the sound of loud prop planes here (in Redondo Beach--still getting the house ready to rent). A quick web search reveals that there's an air show at Hawthorne airport this weekend. At the sound of the most recent one, I went out on the balcony to see what it was. It was a Mitchell bomber, similar to the one in which my father was shot down in Italy (though it may have been a different series--I couldn't tell at that distance).

There were only two survivors--him and one other, and his crewmate was captured behind the German lines, spending the remainder of the war in a POW camp. My father was the second one out because he was a radio gunner at the waist of the plane, and he came down in Allied territory, breaking his leg on landing. The rest of the crew didn't have time to bail, or at least to do so and get a chute open. Reportedly, you couldn't get him in a plane again for many years after that (though he'd gotten over it by the time I was old enough to remember). He'd flown his plane, with his crew, over to Europe (stopping at Ascension Island), but he came home on a troop ship.

It was also the aircraft type that performed the Tokyo raid after Pearl Harbor under Jimmy Doolittle's command.

It's only a twin engine plane. The sound of this single one made me wonder how awesome it would have been to hear whole squadrons of B-17s flying over.

Back around the anniversary of the D-Day landings, there were various letters trickling into the newspapers by people talking about their memories of it. One, which is an image that has stuck with me, was a woman who'd been working in a farmhouse (presumably somewhere on the south coast) and heard a louder droning than usual. Looks outside, and a solid carpet of aircraft; this continual stream of troop-carriers and gliders going overhead for hours on end. I keep getting this awed mental image of it; very cinematic.

Incidentally, it's the anniversary of the southern France landings in '44 today.

Yes, and ten days from now will be the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Paris which, as we all know, was a crime against humanity.

If one can't go back in time, then the next best thing is to go to the annual AirVenture held by the EAA in Oshkosh, WI, and just sit and listen to the warbirds. XCOR had a booth next to the warbird area in 2001 and EVERY DAY about two dozen, sometimes more, P-51s would taxi past our booth on their way to the airshow. Ah, what a wonderful noise! Nothing in the world sounds as great as those Merlin engines.
Saturday is especially tasty: they have a boom-and-zoom show with lots of pyro and emeny planes chasing each other.

"The sound of this single one made me wonder how awesome it would have been to hear whole squadrons of B-17s flying over."

Extrapolating a bit, pretty freakin' awesome. A B-17 from AirVenture flew past before the show. I had time to hear the rumble, head outside and find a good spot in the yard for gawking.

I'm bad at guesstimating altitude, but it was maybe a thousand feet or so. Loud, powerful, manly sounding engine noise it was. What a warplane should sound like.