Siobhan O’Donnell on the coming Airpower History Tour, the strange intimacy of touching a machine that outlived the men who flew it, and what New Orleans does to memory
I went out to Lakefront Airport this week for a preview walk-through ahead of October’s Airpower History Tour, and I stood underneath a fully restored B-17 Flying Fortress called Texas Raiders, one of only nine still flying out of the 12,731 that were ever built, and I put my hand flat against the fuselage the way you’re technically not supposed to and thought, entirely without meaning to, about my grandfather’s hands. He wasn’t a pilot. He was ground crew, Pacific theater, a story he told maybe four times in my entire childhood and never once in any detail worth repeating here. But something about the actual cold aluminum under my palm brought him back sharper than any photograph in the family album ever has.
What This October Tour Actually Brings To The City
Alongside Texas Raiders, the tour’s bringing FIFI, the B-29 Superfortress, one of only two still flying anywhere in the world, landing at the WWII Air, Sea, and Land Expo at the National WWII Museum. There’s a full formation coming with her too, the C-47 Skytrain that led the main invasion force on D-Day, a P-51 Mustang, a B-25 Mitchell, even a PT-19 trainer, the whole living catalog of what this country built and flew across a war that’s now genuinely passing out of living memory rather than just history-book memory.
Why That Distinction Actually Matters To Me
I think there’s a real difference between history you read about and history that still has people alive who witnessed it directly, and we are, this exact decade, watching that second category quietly empty out. The docents who work these planes now, most of them, are volunteers a generation or two removed from actual combat service, keeping the machines flying as a kind of inherited stewardship rather than personal memory. I asked one of them at Lakefront this week whether he’d known any actual B-17 crew personally. He said his own father had, briefly, decades ago, but that connection is already once removed for him and will be twice removed for whoever takes over maintaining these aircraft after him.
What Actually Struck Me Walking Through The Cockpit
The instrument panel is so much smaller and so much more analog than I’d expected, dials instead of screens, everything mechanical in a way that makes you understand, physically rather than intellectually, how much raw human judgment these missions actually required with so little automated assistance backing it up. I kept thinking about nineteen-year-olds, because that’s genuinely what most of these crews were, nineteen and twenty years old, making split-second decisions in that cramped, freezing, deafeningly loud space with instruments that look, by any modern standard, almost primitive.
How New Orleans Specifically Shapes This Kind Of Remembering
This city does memory differently than most places I’ve lived, more physically, more processionally, we don’t just commemorate things, we walk them, we parade them, we put our actual hands on them when we’re allowed to. I think that’s exactly why the Airpower History Tour lands here so meaningfully each year, because this is a city that already understands history as something you experience with your body, not just something you read quietly in a museum placard. The National WWII Museum itself sits here for exactly that reason, not incidentally, this being the place where the Higgins boats that carried troops onto the beaches were actually built.
A Smaller, More Recent Story From The Same Airport World
Meanwhile, over at the actual working airport, Louis Armstrong International just installed new FAA safety radar this summer, technology specifically designed to prevent the kind of runway collision that killed two pilots at LaGuardia back in March, part of a small but genuinely important wave of safety upgrades happening at major airports nationally. It’s a strange kind of parallel, the same week I’m standing under a seventy-year-old bomber thinking about my grandfather, the modern airport a few miles away is quietly installing technology built specifically to prevent the kind of catastrophic accident that era’s aviation simply had to accept as an ever-present risk.
What I’m Actually Going To Do Before October
I’m going to call my aunt this week and ask her, properly, with a recorder running this time, everything she remembers her father, my grandfather, ever telling her about his service, because I realized standing at Lakefront that I’ve let those four stories fade into a vague family myth rather than an actual documented account, and once she’s gone too, whatever detail I haven’t captured is simply gone permanently. The planes get restored and kept flying by people who never knew the men who first flew them. The people who did know them are the ones I actually still have time to properly ask.
Why I’m Writing This Down Before I Even Make That Call
I think part of me is writing this publicly first because it makes the private call harder to keep postponing. I’ve told myself for years that I’d get to it eventually, that there was no urgency, that my aunt would simply always be available whenever I finally got around to asking properly. Standing under that bomber this week, cold aluminum under my palm, nineteen-year-olds’ ghosts in every rivet, I understood how thin that assumption actually is. October will bring the planes back to this runway. It won’t bring back anyone who actually flew in them. That part of the story only survives if someone like me picks up the phone before it’s too late to ask.