This is a quick post pointing to a NY Times story about a WW II C-47 that will be heading out from Geneseo, NY across the Atlantic to once more fly over Normandy.
...But on Thursday, a septuagenarian war horse known as the Whiskey 7 will take off from a grass airstrip in central New York to attempt its most ambitious post-armistice mission: a trans-Atlantic crossing to pay tribute to the young Americans who went to war in Europe and those who never came home.
The plane — a twin-engine, propeller-driven C-47 military transport — will cross the famously frigid North Atlantic for the 70th anniversary of the storming of Normandy during World War II, when the Whiskey 7 was a lead plane in a Britain-based group that dropped paratroopers over coastal France. This time around, its crew will navigate a 3,600-mile-long — and presumably flak-free — route, making refueling stops in Maine, Labrador, Greenland, Iceland and Scotland before buzzing the skies over Omaha Beach in early June.
The
National Warplane Museum, in
Geneseo, NY is home base for the historic plane. (
shortfinals did a diary about a visit there.) It's one of those out of the way places that's helping keep history alive, not too far from Rochester, NY and
Letchworth State Park, the Grand Canyon of the East.
Bon Voyage Whiskey 7, and Happy Landings!