Originally Posted by
falcon900
I'm all for experience, and much prefer old pilots to bold pilots, but as with all things, there must be some sort of limit, and in response to TTN's earlier question, yes, my eyebrows were raised when I saw the age of the pilots. I am not at this stage casting any aspersions or attempting to apportion blame, just noting something which I found surprising. While we are on the subject of raised eyebrows, did anyones eyebrows raise when they discovered the number of passengers aboard?
I took a ride on that very aircraft about 10 years ago, and 13 was the standard load - 3 crew and 10 paying passengers. Everyone had a place to strap in for takeoff and landing (not terribly comfortable, but adequate). Once up and away we were allowed to get up and move about the aircraft. As for weight, normal crew for combat missions was 10 - the fact that this one wasn't carrying tons of bombs and ammunition (and at least some of the 50 cal machine guns had been replaced with wooden mock ups) easily accounted for the mass of 3 additional passengers.
As for the age of the pilots, they had two elderly pilots who were both highly experienced with thousands of hours on a B-17. Personally I'd take that over some 40 year olds that had 50 hours on type...