World War II Database

Classic WWII warbirds should not be flown. Period. I'm just going to throw that out there, and accept that it will be wildly unpopular with the warbird community. But continuing to fly these things is lunacy. We've lost three flyable B-17s destroyed since 2011, with thirteen fatalities. This has reduced the number of flyable B-17s on the planet by 25%. If we keep flying them, it is absolutely inevitable that we will lose every single one of them. It's guaranteed, unavoidable, and as certain as gravity. The only question is how long it'll take, and how many people will die in the process.

These are 80 year-old military airframes that were not designed or built with safety in mind. No matter how lovingly they are maintained, they are still full of complex, finicky machinery that wasn't necessarily all that reliable on the day they were built, let alone now. And funniest thing, they are not always as well-maintained as we might like to think. Nor are they required by the NTSB to conform to modern commercial standards for passenger-carrying aircraft (because maintenance and safety requires, you know, a lot of money, which in many cases the individual owners or struggling non-profits that own these birds simply don't have enough of.) And lastly, human pilots make mistakes, and will continue doing so. Put all three together, and you've got an unsolvable problem. They are going to continue crashing.

These aircraft are literally irreplaceable. It's like flying around a Monet or a Rembrandt and then wondering, "Gee, why do we see fewer and fewer of them in the Louvre?" The longer we hold off grounding them, the fewer of them (and their crew and passengers) there will be. But we simply need to face up to the facts and stop flying them.