[Aloha1]

Originally Posted by SIRE1

I went over to Leesburg yesterday and went through the B24. Barely made it through so I decided to only look at the B17 from the outside. Couldn't help wondering how those air crews could handle the cold weather at 30,000 ft. The waist gunners were standing in front of an open window and the skin of the bombers are really only a thin sheet of aluminum and couldn't have provided any warmth inside the plane. I have to really appreciate what that generation went through. It was a real pleasure to get up close to these iconic planes. Saw someone taking a plane ride in the P51 Mustang.

Trust me, the B17 was much harder to move around in than the 24. You went up the rear access port then got into a crawl position to duck through into the waist gunner area. The catwalk between the stacked bombs was the width of your foot and about 10 inches wide.
Amazing how those men managed it all.