VERO BEACH —Spaces are still available this weekend to take a flight on a vintage World War II bomber airplane. The Aluminum Overcast, built in 1945 at the end of the Second World War for bombing missions over occupied Europe, will be at the Vero Beach Municipal Airport Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
One Friday flight is fully booked and some seats are still available on another flight. Saturday the plane will start flying at 4:30 p.m. and Sunday the plane will go up as often as it needs to. It can hold 10 passengers for each flight.
An 18-minute flight aboard the historic airplane costs $475 per person. It costs $5,000 an hour to operate it.
The plane is now owned by the Experimental Aircraft Association headquartered in Oshkosh, Wis., but the plane, which is now on a national tour after being in maintenance for a year and a half, is a self-sustaining proposition.
Some 12,000 of the four-engine propeller-driven bombers were built between the mid-1930s and 1945, but only 13 are still flying at present.
As it travels around the country, the airplane attracts a lot of attention from aircraft buffs, and World War II and Korean War veterans.
The plane visiting Vero at present was manufactured too late during World War II to see any action in the Europe air war. It was actually built by Lockheed in Burbank, CA, because Boeing in Seattle could not keep up with the demand for the planes.
The B-17 bomber was dubbed a “Flying Fortress” by a Seattle journalist because it had its own defense mechanisms and did not have to be accompanied by fighter planes on its bombing runs over the European continent like other, more cumbersome bombers – and the nickname “Flying Fortress” stuck. Machine guns are sticking out of the plane’s nose, tail, belly and sides.
