A FEEL FOR HISTORY : Man Whose Father Piloted a B-17 Gets the Ride of His Life

Mike Ward got to fulfill a childhood fantasy on Monday.

Stepping 55 years into history, he climbed aboard a World War II B-17 bomber and roared across the skies of Southern California.

“It was fantastic,” said Ward, 51, whose father piloted a B-17 on 25 bombing raids over Europe during the war. “It was a strange but good feeling. My father was flying one of these things more than 50 years ago, and people were shooting at him!”

The airplane, one of a handful of B-17s in the country still flying, flew from Palomar Airport near San Diego to John Wayne Airport. Flying beside it was a B-24 Liberator purported to be the only one of its kind in the air. The two vintage bombers, both owned by the Collings Foundation of Stow, Mass., will remain at John Wayne until Wednesday. Members of the public can pay $7 for a walking tour of the airplanes, or $300 to fly in one of them.

“We want them to have a sense of history,” said Jay F. Walker, 74, of Carlsbad, a member of the foundation who piloted a B-17 when he was in his early 20s during World War II. “We want them to be aware of what the airmen went through.”

What they went through, Walker said, included sitting in cramped quarters for 10 hours at a stretch with the roar of the engines vibrating in their ears. Temperatures were so low, he said, that touching the wall of the plane could mean losing the skin off your hand. And with dozens of bombers in the air and fighter planes attacking from all directions, he said, every man aboard knew that each flight could be his last.

“It wasn’t exactly like being on a miniature golf course,” Walker said of B-17 bombing missions, memorialized in a 1990 movie called “Memphis Belle.”

One of Walker’s buddies during flight training in the 1940s was Ward’s dad, Rolland, now 75 and living in Sedona, Ariz. So it wasn’t much of a stretch for the pilot to call the younger Ward, who is an Irvine city councilman and a member of the Orange County Transportation Authority’s board of directors, to invite him along for the ride.

“I’ve heard about the B-17 all my life,” Ward said before taking off, “so I’m really excited. I saw all my dad’s pictures, watched the movies, but never flew in one before.”

That changed Monday afternoon as the Flying Fortress and its companion B-24 roared into the skies above Carlsbad and headed over the ocean toward Santa Catalina.

One of the first things Ward did was whip out his cellular telephone and call his dad in Sedona.

“I just took off from Palomar Airport on a B-17,” he said, yelling into the telephone to be heard above the din.

“Yeah,” his father said, “it sounds like it.”

Known for their durability, the B-17s--usually flying in tight formation--were a major component of the American war effort over Europe. Often, Walker said, the planes came back bearing damage from gunfire that would have blown most airplanes out of the sky.

“They’d have holes in the wing big enough to walk through and still be flying,” he remembered.

For Ward’s dad, that meant some harrowing experiences. Several times, the younger Ward said, the plane had to limp back to the base on less than all of its four engines. Sometimes bits of shrapnel found their way into the cockpit. And once, Ward said, a burst hydraulic fuel line splattered crew members with a reddish liquid that some mistook for blood.

“They had to feel themselves all over to see if they were wounded,” Ward said.

The scene was radically different on Monday’s hourlong flight. Cruising over Catalina on a crystal-clear day, the two bombers flew in tight formation as Ward scrambled from compartment to compartment, peering over the pilot’s shoulder and crawling into the gunner’s bubble. Several times he stuck his head out an open hatch, letting 160 mph winds muss up his hair. And sporting a childlike grin, he snapped pictures out every window with undisguised enthusiasm.

“This is better than I even thought it would be,” Ward said.

Eventually, the planes circled back toward the mainland, passing Long Beach Harbor before buzzing over John Wayne Airport for their final landing approach. Already, a crowd of enthusiasts had gathered on the ground for the $7 tours.

“The people who flew in these things were really amazing,” Ward said after squeezing out a door that looked like it was made for a child. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”