Warbird Information Exchange

If you haven't seen this movie (I think that's the title), watch it. The last few minutes of the movie show the hero, a layed-off bombardier, taking a stroll through a scrap yard. Great footage of P39's and B17's. Does anybody know where this was?

BT13 moment- while he is in the ATC shack, a BT13 taxis by. The rest of the movie is pretty good too. Good movie to watch with an S.O/C.F (signifigant other, camp follower).

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REMEMBER THE SERGEANT PILOTS!

The boneyard scenes were filmed at what is now Chino Airport in Southern California. The once-named Cal-Aero Field was under the jurisdiction of the War Assets Administration with thousands of surplus warplanes stored there. The aerial scenes in the film, supposedly depicting a cross-country low-level flight in a B-17 were reportedly filmed from the nose of Paul Mantz's new B-25H, N1203. The aerial scenes of the airplane boneyard may be of the yard at Stillwater, Oklahoma, most of whose airplanes actually belonged to Paul Mantz at the time.

Interesting stuff. Check out the book "Military Aircraft Boneyards" for more on these scrapyards.

With a lot of freeze-framing, I was able to discern nine serial numbers on the B-17Fs in this film at Chino:

41-24636
42-3236
42-3463 ("Round ? Trip", scenes with Dana Andrews)
42-5322
42-5333
42-5742 (Combat veteran, "Plain Dealing Express")
42-29929
42-30305
42-30890

...and one partial number:

42-305?7

This was from video; you might find more on the DVD... where's the Visine...

My wife doesn't understand why I cry before the end of the movie. Well, she does, but she pretends that her husband is an emotionless curmudgeon who cares only about airplanes. She knows me so well...

_________________
REMEMBER THE SERGEANT PILOTS!

Don't forget at the beginning of the movie, they overfly all the B-17s and B-24s at the "Boone City Airport", where Dana Andrews says "Man, we could have used all those planes in '43" (or something to that effect).

The Best Years of Our Lives is still one of those movies that whenever I see it on TV, I'll stop what I'm doing and watch it, even if I've seen it over a dozen times.