TODAY'S MISSION: NORMANDY

摘要

"I CALL IT FLYING WITH GHOSTS," says Barry Fait. "Every time I climb in this thing, I can't help thinking about who's been in this airplane, what they did, and what they accomplished." We're standing beside his Douglas C-47, Virginia Ann, one of three World War Ⅱ transports parked on the grass strip at Flabob Airport in southern California's Riverside County. Against a backdrop of palm trees swaying in warm desert wind, the scene is about as far as you can get from the wrenching, dark hours of Operation Overlord, during which more than 1,000 Allied transports flew low across the English Channel around midnight on the leading edge of D-Day: June 6,1944. At an event this June 6,75 years after C-47s like Virginia Ann spearheaded the Allied invasion of northern France, dozens of C-47s and their civilian counterpart DC-3s will reenact the airborne assault that marked the beginning of the end of World War II. Virginia Ann and two other SoCal locals-Flabob Express, owned by a group headed by Jon Goldenbaum, and D-Day Doll, flown by the Commemorative Air Force's Inland Empire Wing-are among a delegation of U.S.-based airplanes preparing to cross the Atlantic to join in the reenactment.