The World War II-era B-17 bomber that crashed Wednesday was never designed to carry passengers. Yet seven died. Should historic flights end?
You climb aboard a vintage bomber, hear the rumble as its four propellers roar to life, then fly off into the wild blue yonder to experience first-hand the warplanes that played a key role in liberating Europe from the Nazis.
The Nine-O-Nine, which crashed near Hartford, Connecticut, was one of several vintage planes around the country that take paying passengers aboard for short flights. And the crews manning the planes can be as old as the aircraft themselves. The B-17G's pilot, Ernest McCauley of Long Beach, California, was age 75. Co-pilot Michael Foster of Jacksonville, Florida, was 71. Both are presumed dead.
"This tragic crash raises very significant and urgent issues about the safety requirements of these vintage aircraft," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat."Most of them are 70 years old, providing tourist and sightseeing attractions for people who trust they are boarding an airplane that is maintained and inspected in the same way that commercial aircraft are. The fact is, they may not be.
Given their ages, they are"not only at greater risk to have equipment failures in the airplane ... but they are not built to any crash standard," Slack said. They, for instance, are likely to lack fuel-containment features that are standard in modern planes, such as bladders around tanks, automatic self-sealing and fracture-resistant fuel lines.
But even then, incidents can happen. A C-47 transport operated by the CAF, the military version of the DC-3 twin-engine passenger plane built in1944, caught fire last year on takeoff from Burnet, Texas. All 13 aboard were able to escape even as the plane, dubbed the"Bluebonnet Belle," was destroyed. Anthony Roman, a former corporate pilot who runs a commercial investigative and intelligence firm, said he rode aboard the Nine-O-Nine several years ago on a 45-minute flight from an airport in Farmingdale, New York. He said he paid about $450 for the experience.
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