I had a chance to crawl through a B-17 a few months ago [And I do mean "crawl"! It is amazing how big old airplanes look. When I did a walk-through of B-29 "Fi-Fi", I thought it was kind of small. At the time I was flying Boeing 727's, and they were WAY larger than the B-29. For four years I flew nothing but 747's as first officer and captain....then I returned to the 727 but for a far better company. But unless you are used to a single-engine Piper or Cessna...the B-17 is TIGHT! People with back problems cannot climb through this airplane. I'm 100% serious- you literally have to be physically fit to climb up the ladder at the front, and then climb into the cockpit, climb out, climb back over the bomb bay on a catwalk that is literally...a place for a cat to walk! Then enter the rear section. Even the rear section isn't all that big.
That movie "Memphis Belle"? I'm sure that the rear interior scenes that they filmed were on a set. The interior looks like it is 8 or 10 feet wide in that movie, kind of like a DC-9 or MD-80 airliner....maybe a DC-3. The reality is that the real airplane is about 2/3 that size. These folks fought in close quarters!
And they were flying in a "beer can". The only thing that separated them from German bullets was the lack of training/experience of the German pilots and about a millimeter of soft aluminum. There was no armor; they might as well have been flying on an aerial "convertible", with the top down.
Anyway, the pix. The guys that flew these planes? They had balls the size of Indiana cantaloupes!
