I can't cite the source, but I remember reading somewhere that the B-17 that was deliberately wrecked had previously been contaminated by radiation during tests on exposure to nuclear explosions and fallout, and that it could no longer continue to be flown long-term. It had to be scrapped anyway, and this movie gave it a glorious last hurrah.
My best friend and I both flew F-4 Phantoms in the Air Force in the late '70s and early '80s. My friend, in a complete serendipity, was visiting a friend who was in charge of the drone target program at Holloman AFB, NM. The friend showed him around, and as they entered a hangar, my friend saw "his" old plane (i.e. the one which had had his name on the canopy and which he'd flown the most) among the F-4s converted into target drones. (It was eerily similar to a scene in a novel my same friend himself had written twenty years earlier, where the hero, a P-51 pilot in WWII, finds his old mount on a flightline in Korea.) That led me to look up the tail number of "my" F-4 on the web, whereupon I confirmed my suspicion that it, too, had been converted into a drone. We had some long discussions over the phone (I live in Jersey and he lives in Texas) about it, and as my friend put it, better for them to die a warrior's death than to end up gutted and on a concrete slab at a base gate somewhere.
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buckboard
19 years ago
You are correct. The Air Force in 1949 still had a few B-17s in its active inventory. Henry King personally scouted four airbase sites as possible locations for the fictional Archbury and one of them, Eglin, had 12 assigned. Another 4 were at Brookley AFB at Mobile, Alabama. 8 of the Eglin B-17s and all 4 of the Brookley aircraft were loaned to Fox for the filming. The aircraft that pancaked was one of the 4 from Brookley and had been part of Operation Crossroads, with residual radiation. Nevertheless, after the filming Fox returned it to the Air Force.
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