AOPA Turbine Pilot Magazine - September 2019 - 60

D-DAY VETERAN D-Day Doll and

Flabob Express trail behind That's
All, Brother during a formation
training exercise over the English
countryside near Duxford before
the anniversary commemorative
flights (facing, top). Paratrooper
reenactors sign commemorative
flags and then climb aboard for
practice jumps over England
before heading to Normandy.

Karl Stoltzfus, chairman of Dynamic
Aviation and owner of Douglas C-47A
Miss Virg inia, ended his pretakeoff
comments to the 16 of us sitting in the
76-year-old Skytrain with the prayer Gen.
Dwight Eisenhower included at the end of
his message to the troops departing for the
D-Day invasion of Europe on June 5, 1944.
Moments later the old airplane carried
us into the sky-destination Normandy,
France-and into a very different world
than her peers faced 75 years earlier when
France and most of Europe were under
Nazi control. This century, there would be
no one shooting at us as the formation of
C-47s and DC-3s streamed from Duxford,
England, over London and the white cliffs
of Dover and across the English Channel
to Normandy. En route a couple of P-51
Mustangs whizzed by, escorting the fleet
during the crossing.
Shortly after crossing the beaches of
Normandy, some of those C-47s began
spewing out paratroopers over Drop Zone
K, located near Sannerville just outside
Caen, France. Reenactors in period uniforms and dangling from round chutes
similar to the 1944 style swooshed into a
large field as thousands looked on-none
of them pointing guns.
After roaring over the drop zone, the
C-47s ambled to Caen, landing on pavement but taxiing and parking on the vast

grass infield, rolled smooth as a golf green.
Twenty-one iconic Douglas transports
made the historic anniversary passage;
two that had been in Duxford didn't make
the formation because of maintenance
issues. Not bad for a group of airplanes all
more than three-quarters of a century old.
ACROSS THE POND

Fifteen of the Gooney Birds started their
twenty-first-century commemorative trip
from the United States as part of the D-Day
Squadron, a nonprofit organization formed
by the Tunison Foundation to support the
effort to bring the aging airplanes from
North America to the seventy-fifth anniversary event. The Tunison Foundation
is the owner of one of the D-Day veteran C-47s, Placid Lassie. The D-Day
Squadron's multi-year mission was to bring
a squadron of C-47s back to Normandy for
the seventy-fifth anniversary of the start
of Operation Overlord, the largest armada
of ships and aircraft in the history of the
planet-nearly 7,000 vessels and nearly
11,600 aircraft launched that day.
Eric Zipkin of the Tunison Foundation
brought Placid Lassie to the seventieth
anniversary and was saddened to see
only a handful of the iconic C-47s there.
He became determined to change that for
the seventy-fifth and formed the squadron
as a means to assist and encourage other

KEEPING TIME

While Douglas C-47 Miss Montana sports a host of modern
avionics in her 75-year-old panel, the eight-day wind-up
clock is a World War II veteran. Bryan Douglass, one of the
leaders of the Miss Montana to Normandy project, tells of
how a man showed up with a clock at the hangar where the
airplane was being restored. He was given the clock by his
father, a World War II pilot. At the end of the war, his father
was instructed to taxi his Douglas A-26 Invader to the end of
the runway in France, remove all the fuel, and set the airplane
on fire. Reluctantly, he did, but not before removing the
clock, which he handed down to the son. The son was hoping
to pass it to his son, but he wondered if the Miss Montana
crew might have a need for it. The crew placed the clock in
the panel, and flew it to Normandy and back. Douglass said
he was honored to carry it and was anxious to return it to its
owner to be passed to another generation.
-TBH

60 | AOPA PILOT September 2019
AOPA Turbine Pilot Magazine - September 2019

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