World War II bomber tours skies over Casper

From Wyoming Tribune: World War II bomber tours skies over Casper

The engines chug to life. A brief bit of smoke and then a steady rumble.

Inside the B-25 Mitchell, David Bronson straps his seatbelt and waits. Lightning flashes outside the window. There’s thunder too but no way to hear it, as the aircraft — nearly seven decades old — rumbles down the runway.

Bronson hates jets. The turbulence mostly. It makes him nervous.

The B-25 is different. It might be loud and cramped, barely wide enough at the waist for a man to stretch out his arms. But to him, the old bomber is a hot rod.

“It’s a stock car, with oversized engines,” he says.

For three years now, he’s been touring with the Commemorative Air Force, an Arizona-based nonprofit that restores and flies WWII aircraft. The group flew its B-25, the Maid in the Shade, to Casper on Monday.
It’s a homecoming of sorts. After he retired, Bronson moved to Riverton. A few years back, the group visited the town with its B-17, a four-engine bomber that’s more like a sedan to the B-25’s coupe. He got a ride, and afterward, the volunteers convinced him to join.

Bronson was born in 1944, the same year the Maid in the Shade bombed railroad bridges in Italy and Yugoslavia. Growing up, he built models of World War II planes. Now he flies around the country in them.
“To get the chance, as old as I am now, when I only dreamed about it when I was a kid, you just can’t imagine,” he says.

He sits in the narrow fuselage, just behind the bomber’s two .50-caliber machine guns. Hat backward, with a blue flight suit.

The job is simple. Clean the aircraft. Help the passengers through the tiny belly hatch. Let them know when it’s OK to explore the airplane, and corral them when it’s time to land.

The plane flies low and fast over Casper, not even eye level with the mountains. It banks north and down over the river, shoving the riders backs into their seats. Downtown passes by and then the runway comes back into view.

It doesn’t take long to descend. A bump when the wheels touch down. Bronson pulls off his harness and opens the hatch below.

“This is class now,” he says. “Anybody can ride a jet.”