My flight in a legendary B-17 “Flying Fortress”!

The Liberty Foundation’s 2018 “Salute To Veterans” has brought a legendary aircraft to Boise…The “Madras Maiden”, a B-17 “Flying Fortress. It’s one of just 12 B-17’s in the world that are still flying today! Flying around in a single engine Cessna 172 during my 21 years as an Airborne Traffic Reporter was great, but being able to actually go up in this legendary plane was really something! This weekend (April 21/22) you can get up close and even tour inside this iconic airplane, and tours are free. Now if you want the awesome experience of actually flying over Boise, you’ll need to bring along some cash…$450, for a 45 minutes experience, which includes about 30 minutes of flying. Ray Fowler is a volunteer and Chief Pilot of the Liberty Foundation, and says while that sounds expensive…but a B-17 cost is over $5,000 per flight hour, and the Liberty Foundation spends over $1,500,000 annually to keep the B-17 airworthy and out on tour…rather than it sitting in one museum somewhere! Plenty of people want this nearly “once in a lifetime” opportunity to actually fly in one these bad boys from WWII…as of Wednesday, there were already 80 people signed up for this weekends flights! Enjoy the pics (videos on my Facebook page), and hopefully you can get out to see the “Madras Maiden” up close! Flights will run on the hour from 10am to 2pm Saturday & Sunday, and FREE tour times are 2:30pm to sunset both days…at the Jackson Jet Center.