Old warbirds have a place in my heart, too. An old colleague of mine from my Pittsburgh and Mountain View days, Eleanor Jane Johnson, turned me on to them. Her father had been a WWII flight surgeon in the Pacific and she had caught the bug early, joined the Confederate Air Force and was involved in the restoration of the old Sunderland Flying Boat they kept at NAS Alameda across the Bay. It's the plane that stands in for a Pan American Clipper in one of the Indiana Jones movies. My own father had been an airplane mechanic during the Big One, servicing C-47s flying over the Hump at a remote base in Burma. And I remember I making her day when I donated some of his old uniform patches and buttons so she could trick out the authentic Army Air Corps uniform she wore to re-enactments and air shows.

EJJ or "EJ-squared" as she called herself, grew up in Rainy Lake on the Canadian Border where she worked as a fishing guide, raised a family, and studied to be an opera director and stage manager in college. She worked as an image processing lab tech with me in Pittsburgh, and when the company we worked for went under and I moved to Silicon Valley, I was able to get her a job there and she joined my wife and I in Mountain View.

Jane was friends with the crew of Sentimental Journey, one of the few B-17 Flying Fortresses still flying, and when it came to the Air Show at Moffet Field she introduced me to the old timers who still lovingly serviced and flew the great plane. I noticed with admiration that one of them, a wiry man in his 60s or 70s, former aircrew, could still enter the ship by jumping up from the tarmac and chinning himself through the hatch under the cockpit. Jane, who was working on her pilot's license, got to actually fly the bomber from the right seat, putting her through a few maneuvers while I watched from the field.

Jane died prematurely of a brain tumor a few years after I left California.
Mutual friends wrote me and sent me the bad news. I hadn't thought about her in years, until one weekend morning, not that long ago, I went out to get the paper and heard the unmistakeable drone of a B-17 in the approach pattern to our local municipal airport. It probably wasn't Sentimental Journey, this one was wearing all her war paint, and I suspect it was probably Aluminum Overcast, one of the few other Fortresses still in flying condition.

A few minutes later a B-24 followed, also decked out in her battle colors, her Perspex canopy glinting in the sun, clearly visible from a mile away, the drone from those big radials booming across the distance. It might even have been the same one mentioned in your article.

These old planes are still flying, lovingly maintained by the men who flew them, and new devotees like Jane, who spend enormous personal resources scouring the world for parts and painstakingly machining new ones from scratch, to keep the remnants of those old vast fleets flying.
Sadly, like their crews, a few are lost every year.

I thought of Jane as I watched the old warbirds fly up Commercial Boulevard to make their landing. There must be an airshow at the airport this weekend, I thought. Jane will be there for sure.