Ya think these guys heard that the President of Toyota was turning hot laps at Daytona?
World War II history thunders to life at Daytona airport
By Eileen Zaffiro-Kean, Daytona Beach News-Journal
March 3, 2012
DAYTONA BEACH -- On the southern edge of Daytona Beach International Airport, hundreds of people are journeying back to the 1940s this weekend.
Parked just outside an aviation business's hangar, a row of olive green World War II military vehicles with mounted guns and two P-51 Mustang fighter planes adorned with six 50-caliber machine guns stand ready for inspection.
But stealing the show is the long, silver B-29 Superfortress flown in the later years of World War II. The four-engine, propeller-driven heavy bomber is the last of its kind in the world still flying. B-29s were the planes that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"To see this, it's history, and there's not too much of it left," said Jim Nowak, an Air Force veteran of Vietnam wintering in New Smyrna Beach.
Nowak was one of about 100 people who gathered at Yelvington Jet Aviation Friday morning to watch the B-29 thunder into the sky for one of many flights it's making over the Daytona Beach area this weekend.
The nonprofit Commemorative Air Force, sort of a traveling museum with 150 World War II aircraft, brought the B-29 and one of the P-51s for a four-day visit that began Thursday afternoon.
The Commemorative Air Force has been moving the planes from city to city throughout the United States for five decades, and will next head to Titusville for the TICO Warbird AirShow that begins Wednesday.
It's the best way to teach people about World War II, and the legions of soldiers who fought in the battles that claimed thousands of lives, said Chris Trobridge, a public information officer with the Commemorative Air Force.
"Our mission is to preserve the legacy of the men and women who flew in World War II," said Trobridge, a history professor at Texas Tech University.
"A lot of the younger generations don't understand what World War II was even about, and the sacrifice soldiers made," said Trobridge, whose grandfather was a B-24 flight engineer. "This gives them a little taste. There's something very powerful about hearing and seeing these planes fly."
Conrad Yelvington -- the owner of the hangar, nine military vehicles and one of the P-51s on display -- agreed the history needs to be kept alive.
"How many people are old enough to remember all this?" asked the 85-year-old Yelvington, a lifelong Daytona Beach resident who got his pilot's license when he was 17 and still flies. "Most people only know what they read."
A constant stream of people poured in Friday to stare at the rare aircraft, climb into the cockpit for an up-close look and take a 30-minute flight over the area.
Unpaid volunteers fly and maintain the planes. Some are airline pilots, some are veterans and one flew Air Force One for Presidents Johnson and Nixon.
Just the sight of the B-29 and the deep roar of its engines were enough to bring Palm Coast resident Carol Lemke to tears. Her father was a gunner on B-29s, and she often went with him to reunions of his fellow Army Air Corps soldiers. He died six years ago.
"He would have loved this," Lemke said, staring at the plane as it prepared to lumber into the sky. "He would have paid whatever to be in the front. We're here for him."
Boeing made just under 4,000 of the B-29s from 1943 to 1946. The planes cost $640,000 in the 1940s, $9 million in today's dollars.
Only two-dozen of the B-29s are left, all in museums except for "Fifi," the nickname of the bomber in Daytona Beach this weekend.
Just as the aircraft are disappearing, so are World War II vets. But some of them wandered the airfield Friday, including 87-year-old Chuck Downey.
Downey, an Illinois resident who lives in DeLand seven months of the year, said he was a naval aviator who went to war in a dive bomber and flew off carriers. He enlisted when he was 18, and was a Navy commander by the time he was 33.
Proudly wearing his gold Distinguished Flying Cross on his shirt, Downey stood at the gate collecting the $5 entrance fee from visitors. In return for their money, most of them also got some of Downey's World War II stories.
Yelvington, who lives in the Spruce Creek Fly-In and owns six planes, is also a World War II veteran. He served in the Navy and was stationed in Jacksonville but wound up not going into combat.
Yelvington recalled meeting the pilot of the B-29 Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945. During that conversation 15 years ago at an aviation event in Kissimmee, he asked the pilot, Col. Paul Tibbets, if he had any remorse about killing so many people in Japan.
"He said, 'No, I ended the war,' " Yelvingtonrecalled.
As many planes as he saw during the war and since, Yelvington was still wowed Friday watching the B-29 prepare to take off.
"It's amazing the U.S. built something that ended the war," he said. "Tens of thousands of men were killed and this airplane stopped that."
Copyright 2012 The Daytona Beach News-Journal
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updated by @dave-fulton: 03/10/17 07:16:50AM
