Ask yourself this question. You make your first billion dollars, what do you do? Well if you’re Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft), you might start collecting World War II aircraft and decide to display them in a massive hanger. I don’t know when he started to do this but that’s exactly what Paul did. He purchased aircraft from all over the world and shipped them to Everett in Washington. What’s more, he insisted that they all work and are taken out and flown each year.
His collection is exhibited by what’s called the Flying Heritage Collection. So today I drove to Everett with a friend (Chris) to check out the collection.
There were no planes flying today, but we thought we’d check it our anyway. On their web site all the planes appear to be outside on grass or on the runway. But when we arrived they were all inside a large hanger. This was both good and bad. The good part was that there was no hard sunlight on the aircraft making lighting and pictures difficult. The bad part was that the surroundings weren’t as nice.
As a result I took a lot of close up shots, trying to minimize the other planes and distractions around the subject I was going for, but I couldn’t help myself take some wide shots of a complete plane too, and at the end of the day I captured a lot of really nice pictures.
Today’s image is a B-25J Mitchell Bomber. These planes were used by all the allied forces in World War II and in 1942 the B-25 was the first U.S. aircraft to bomb mainland Japan. This particular plane was build towards the end of 1944 in Kansas City and severed in the Royal Canadian Air Force for 10 years before being sold as surplus in 1961. After spending some time as a “fire-bomber” carrying water for the Cascade Drilling Company in Calgary it was purchased by the Flying Heritage Collection.
The aircraft is both amazing and terrifying at the same time. The thought of sitting in the nose cone shooting the enemy just scares me to death. I talked to some of the retired pilots and none of them talked of fear. They were all young at the time of active service and just talked about the thrill of battle and the exhilaration of “winning”. I served in the Armed Forces for 9 years but I don’t think war is like that. I suspect the years have somewhat romanticized their experiences, but they were all amazing characters to talk to.
So look for more planes in the coming weeks, I’ll try to spread them out so you don’t get them all at once. Enjoy.
After today’s visit to the Flying Heritage Collection (Museum) Master Chief had an OCD moment and insisted on washing all over in Purell!
