Time Traveler : Flight on Restored B-17 Is a Journey to the Past

The air in the radio compartment throbs angrily and the tentative shudder of the fuselage at low revolutions becomes a shake and then a wild cacophony of rattles and growls and blasting roars as, on the other side of the bomb bay, David Tallichet presses the four throttles forward. The old plane strains against the brakes.

Finally, Tallichet releases the pressure on the rudder pedals and Number 44-83546 begins its takeoff run, rapidly accelerating toward the hills in the west. Still ground - bound, the plane continues to buffet and wind begins to howl through the open hatch above the radio compartment.

Then, almost imperceptibly, we are airborne, and Tallichet begins the slow climb out of Chino Airport. It is an exalting sight to look backward out of the hatch, down the fuselage and past the tail and see the dairy farms recede in the crackling air as Number 44-83546 thunders into the sun.

Below, on the roads, brake lights wink on and cars slow as the drivers see the great green ghost rising. It is an awesome object, out of place and time, and it leaves an indelible print on the mind’s eye.

The eyes below squint to see the writing on the nose, beneath the gun. Does it really say “Memphis Belle?”

It was a visit to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington in the early 1960s, along with some encouragement from another collector, that did it, Tallichet says.

“I left Washington excited,” he says. “I said, by God, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to collect airplanes.”

Tallichet had the means to do it, and the flying background. He flew 21 missions over occupied Europe in early 1945 as the co-pilot of a B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber. After the war he remained on active Air Force reserve status until 1957, flying a variety of aircraft.

Then, in 1958, after a dissatisfying stint as a supply officer, he went on inactive status and opened his first restaurant, the Reef in Long Beach. It was the first of what would become a nationwide network of restaurants operated by Anaheim-based Specialty Restaurants Corp., of which Tallichet is today president and chief executive officer.

As the money came in from the successful restaurant business, Tallichet and his partner at the time bought a pair of vintage planes, a Stearman and a T-34. Shortly after, Tallichet bought his first P-51 Mustang fighter for $13,000 and the promise of extensive spare parts that could be sold to pay off the loan. The seller skipped with the parts, leaving Tallichet to pick up the tab. Today, he said, he still has the restored P-51, which is now worth about $500,000.

After his Smithsonian visit, Tallichet began collecting and swapping planes throughout the world with the elan of a horse trader. He created the Chino-based Military Aircraft Restoration Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of Specialty Restaurants, specifically to handle the traffic in vintage military aircraft.

“In relation to today,” he says, “the planes were quite cheap and business was good, and I made quite a few trips” to places like New Guinea, the Yukon territory of British Columbia, India--all to buy or sell old airplanes. He has owned, bought, traded or restored--and, for the most part, flown--such historical craft as B-25 Mitchell bombers, Korean-era MiG jets, P-40 Tomahawk fighters, F4U Corsairs, even giant B-29 bombers.

Today, the 68-year-old Orange resident, through his company, owns about 100 planes in various stages of restoration, most of which are World War II vintage military aircraft. The majority of the collection is at Chino Airport. Between 30 and 40 of them, he says, are fully airworthy. By any yardstick, it is an impressive collection.

But, Tallichet says, none of the planes have gotten quite the amount of attention that Number 44-83546 has received in the past couple of months. It is a fully restored B-17G heavy bomber--and Tallichet flew it during the filming of the current film “Memphis Belle.”

The plane played the title role.

Forty-six years ago, combat pilots loved this plane. It was easy to handle. It was forgiving. It was tough. Some called it a tank with wings. Dozens of them got shot to pieces in the ferocious battles over Europe and still flew their crews home.

“It’s an easy, gentle, sweet airplane to fly,” Tallichet says. “You’d have to have a lot of bad luck or stupidity or both to hurt yourself in a B-17.”

But it was built for function, purely. Creature comforts in this restored model are few. To walk from the radio room amidships to the cockpit, one must traverse the bomb bay on a catwalk barely the width of one’s shoe.

But beyond the darkness of the bomb bay is the brilliance of the cockpit, where Tallichet watches the gauges as the plane makes a left climbing bank. The whirling propellers are only inches away, but it is less noisy here because the engines are now behind us and no wind rushes in. It is perfect flying weather and the sun floods in.

Still, it is not the sort of flying that commercial airline passengers are used to. The four huge, 1,200-horsepower Wright Cyclone engines vibrate every inch of the airframe, and the cabin is not pressurized. There are sudden and unexpected small surges in altitude that force the knees to bend if one is standing up and it makes crawling under the cockpit and into the nose a stop-and-go task.

But the nose holds several revelations.

Tallichet acquired his B-17 the same way he got many of his planes: though a series of sales, deals, horse trades, some coincidental, some intentional. The brief version holds that Tallichet acquired and restored an Air Force B-29 bomber and the Air Force, in return, gave him a huge C-123 transport, which he then traded to a firefighting company for a B-17 they were using as a plane to drop water and chemicals on forest fires.

He began to scour the world for parts: a top turret, a ball turret, war surplus radio gear, bomb bay doors, a Norden bombsight. Everything it would take to restore the plane to its wartime configuration. That was eight years ago.

Several months later, Catherine Wyler, daughter of the filmmaker William Wyler, began to piece together a plan for a fictionalized film based on her father’s widely seen wartime documentary film about the combat career of the real Memphis Belle and her crew. As the production began to take shape and the search began for airworthy B-17s--there are only a handful left in the world--Catherine Wyler called on her uncle, David Tallichet.

“She knew her uncle had gone through many years of his life and never found that hero status he wanted, being kind of a nobody in the war,” Tallichet says. “So she said, ‘Would you like to fly in my movie?’ And I said, ‘You bet I would.’ ”

Last year, Tallichet flew his B-17 to England, where it was modified and painted to resemble the real Memphis Belle. (The real Memphis Belle is today restored as a static exhibit in Memphis.)

Robert Morgan, the pilot of the original Memphis Belle, made a flight at the controls of Tallichet’s version of the plane while in England to observe the filming, his first flight in a B-17 since the war. A studio press release quotes Morgan as saying at the time that the flight “was like five Christmases all on the same day.”

The nose, like everyplace else in the plane, is cramped, but it doesn’t feel that way, at least not on the bombardier’s seat. The seat is a small, padded swivel chair and it is at the very tip of the nose, just behind the Plexiglas bubble and the black metal Norden bombsight. The view of the ground is unimpeded and panoramic. It is like being hurled through space independent of engines, airplanes, physics.

It is the sort of view--and feeling--you get when you fly in your dreams.

It is even quieter here, farther forward of the engines, in the area airmen called the greenhouse. Still, it’s not difficult to visualize what a terrifying place it could have been while flying through fields of greasy flak or head-on fighter attacks.

On this flight, however, there is nothing but bright sun and the comforting sight, just out of the tiny side windows, of the giant engines drumming away relentlessly. It is very easy to fall in love with this airplane.

How much does it cost to keep a B-17? That depends, Tallichet says, on whether it works.

“You’re going good until you lose an engine,” he says. “That’ll cost you 30 grand.”

And the parts are out there, somewhere, “in a garage, in a back yard. Someplace, somebody has the part if you have the money to pay for it,” Tallichet says.

The aviation fuel the plane gulps by the hundreds of gallons usually is paid for by those who hire Tallichet to fly the plane at air shows and other aviation events.

He says he doesn’t know what his B-17 is worth, and he doesn’t want to sell it. But, he says, the last airworthy B-17 sold in the United States probably went for between $400,000 and $500,000 two years ago.

The modern version of the Memphis Belle has kept Tallichet’s Military Aircraft Restoration Corp. out of the red for the first time in its history, he says.

“We lost money every year but last year,” he says. “That’s when they made ‘Memphis Belle.’ The money we got from that gave us our first profitable year.”

Tallichet jokingly calls his passion for planes “an idiot’s hobby.” But for the man who says he never saw a propeller-driven fighter from the pilot’s seat of a bomber until the filming of “Memphis Belle,” it is an enterprise that keeps him young.

“You fly it for the challenge, I think,” he says. “I’m 68, and it’s kind of fun to be flying in 1990 when most of my colleagues have long ago given up flying.”

T he wind and the prop blast rush into the waist ports and over the mock-up .50-caliber guns, and the muscles in the thighs work harder to keep the body standing as Tallichet makes a final long, lazy bank to set up his final approach. The wind, the gently changing view out the open window, the pounding of the engines, the gold of the setting sun, all combine to become achingly exhilarating.

The wheels ($1,350 each) screech quickly on the runway and Tallichet turns the giant plane onto a taxiway. The propellers immediately raise a huge cloud of dark brown dust from the adjacent dirt infield. Out on the ramp, knots of people stand and stare, still transfixed, at this apparition from the past that comes thundering slowly toward them. It is too loud, too insistent, too overpowering to be a ghost.

But it is almost too wonderful to be real.