![]() The Lacey Lady was never put in service during the war and, O'Brien and Scott said, logged fewer than 50 hours of flight time. The Bomber Restaurant is still at the location and still run by the Lacey family. It was a landmark for 64 years and remained so even after the station closed in 1991. This time he enlisted the help of an experienced pilot, and they successfully brought her to Oregon.Ĭranes were used to install the bomber over the gas station's 48 nozzles in 1947. According to family lore, officials there wrote it off as "wind damage" and let Lacey pick another. When the landing gear failed, he wrecked the bomber on the runway. His grandfather paid $13,750 for a B-17 and then attempted to fly it by himself. ![]() ![]() "(My grandmother) kind of thought he had flipped," Scott said. Spurred by a $5 bet that he couldn't pull off using a bomber as a canopy for his pumps and staked by a $15,000 loan from a friend, he went shopping for a B-17. Lacey rescued this one from a scrap yard in Altus, Oklahoma. More than 4,700 were lost during World War II, and most were destroyed and sold for scrap metal after the war. "There are other planes like this, far worse off than this, that are getting ready to fly," said O'Brien, who was formerly involved with the Liberty Foundation, which tours the country and offers flights on its restored B-17, the Memphis Belle.Īccording to the Liberty Foundation, fewer than 100 of the 12,732 B-17s produced between 19 still exist, and fewer than 15 can still take to the sky. The organization hopes to eventually build its own facility at the airport, known as McNary Field, and its ultimate goal is to restore the bomber to flight condition. The B-17 Alliance Group has a two-year sublease with Salem Air Center for the hangar, with an option to renew. "Something like this," O'Brien said, "is most often tackled by extremely wealthy people or museums."
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