Most of us with a keen sense of aviation history have wondered what it was like to fly and fight aboard a WWII heavy bomber. We’ve seen wartime footage, and classic war movies like Twelve O’Clock High or Memphis Belle. But have you ever imagined what it would be like to actually train for – and fly on – your own mission in a legendary aircraft like the B-17 Flying Fortress or B-24 Liberator? For the past few years, a select group of individuals has gathered in the California desert near Stockton, California to do just that. The Stockton Field Aviation Museum, collaborating with the Arizona Ground Crew Living History Unit, Inc. and the Collings Foundation, will be offering a unique immersive two-day program in which you will learn the essential arts of each crew station of an American heavy bomber including aerial gunnery and bomb-aiming. Then you get to practice your training in an actual flying mission from a WWII combat aircraft using a Norden bomb site to aim and toggle the (inert) payload over a secure range!
This year’s bomber camp is dubbed ‘Battle of the Bombers’ as unlike previous years where just one of the Collings Foundation’s heavy bombers would be present for the course, participants will get to choose whether they experience their training and mission flight from either the B-17G Flying Fortress ‘Nine-o-Nine’ or the B-24 Liberator ‘Witchcraft’. Both aircraft will participate and go head-to-head to see which team can best get their weapons on the target!
You will experience the sights, sounds and smells of 1944 in this immersive condensed training program. You will step back in time and train as the Air Crews trained during WWII.
Want to enlist or have questions?
Call Sydney at 209-982-0273 – [email protected] or Ken Terpstra at [email protected]
ENLIST NOW!
Here’s a little video from Taigh Raimey to show some of what you will see and experience during Bomber Camp, 2016!
