The people that make things like this happen are truly among the greatest people in the world.
http://www.newsherald.com/news/visit_73 ... iator.html
Above link to the story, pictures, and video.
Final mission: Before death, local aviator visited beloved bomber (See VIDEO, PHOTO GALLERY)
Comments 8 | Recommend 4
April 22, 2009 12:01:00 AM
TERRY BARNER / The News Herald
PANAMA CITY - The plane sat alone on the airport tarmac, awaiting a long-retired war veteran ready to reconnect with the plane he flew in his youth.
The plane, a green B-24 Liberator bomber, is the only aircraft of its type still flyable. Though 20,000 Liberators were produced and flown during World War II, but they were scrapped unceremoniously in favor of toasters and razor blades for post-war America.
"I believe I could fly it right now. I remember that plane," 89-year-old Lowell Mix said recently, ambling slowly toward the bomber while clutching the arm of his wife, Viola, in his right hand and a silver cane in his left.
Click here to see video of Mix's ride, and click here for a photo gallery.
Despite some hearing loss, Mix still could make out the lumbering B-24 fly over his St. Andrews' home that previous February night.
"I told Viola, ‘That's a B-24.' I recognized the engine's (sound) after all these years," he recalled in late February as he met the plane's mechanic, and the Mixes gingerly ascended a small ladder tucked under the bomber's belly.
With a recent illness shrinking his body toward its wartime weight of 140-pounds, Mix was able to slip through the framing of the plane's bomb bay walkway toward the cockpit.
"I'd like to sit in it one more time before I pass on," Mix told friend Charles Nichols and Jayson Owen, the Liberator's mechanic.
Mix died Saturday at age 89.
‘I still believe I could fly'
Mix flew 52 missions in B-24s with names such as "Big Operator" and "Hey, Doc" splashed on the nose. He stood upright and grabbed the handles of a .50-caliber machine gun bristling from the bomber's waist. He recalled the missions where he sat in the same spot as the air discipline officer, guiding the bomber formation during the end of his combat tour.
"One of the favorite tricks of the enemy pilots was they would fly over you like they were looking you over and they would go on until they were almost out of sight," Mix said. "Then they'd flip over and come straight at you with all guns."
The Liberator, built for limber 20-year-olds, is not exactly handicapped-accessible. It took Nichols and Owen several minutes to lift Mix by his pant's belt loops and guide Mix toward the target, the pilot's seat.
"I still believe I could fly this rascal," a breathless Mixon said as he sat in the left seat. Once there, the combat memories returned.
"A fighter plane came head on at us, firing all the way, and just before he got within the range of our .50-calibers, he rolled over.
"The bullet came right between the pilot and co-pilot. They didn't miss us by that far," he said, holding his hands a foot apart. Although the bullets took out the plane's top machine gun turret, his crew was safe.
"We never lost a man on a plane I was flying," Mix said. "Before I went on a mission, I never failed to ask the Lord for protection on behalf of the crew as well as myself."
Flying 8-hour missions from their base in Leece, Italy, Mix and other Allied air crews would form 400-plane bombing groups to attack what Winston Churchill called "the taproot of German might": the old fields and refineries near Ploesti, Romania. They supplied a third of the aviation fuel and lubricants for Adolph Hitler's war machinery. Ploesti had been attacked months early with 53 of the 166 Liberators that made it there being shot down.
In April 1944, Mix and his crew found the city ringed with hundreds of anti-aircraft guns sprouting from rooftops to haystacks.
"You would get over Ploesti, and there would be a big, black cloud, much like a thundercloud, and that cloud was full of flying flack," Mix said. "You are bound to get hit."
Flak screamed through his right inboard motor and started a fire after he had dropped bombs during his second Ploesti mission.
"We opened the bomb bays and alerted the crew to get their parachutes on and be ready to go," Mix said calmly.
Fortunately, his newer B-24J had onboard fire extinguishers in each engine housing.
"I reached down and jerked the (extinguisher release) handle and saw a big puff of white smoke come out, and it put the fire out. Otherwise, we would of all had to jump. That was a close call."
Near the end of his combat tour, Mix trained rookie pilots by co-piloting their missions. There was also time for some aerobatic fun. One time near the Adriatic Sea, the pilot he was training saw a farm below and decided to buzz the chicken house with the B-24.
"He pulled up sharp right over the chicken coop and took it straight up for about 500 feet, and he swung around and we looked back and the sky was full of chickens," Mix recalled, as laughter fills the cockpit. "That updraft had sucked every chicken out of that yard. They were sailing around and flapping their wings 400 feet in air.
Mix said he didn't think the chikens would "lay eggs for six months. It was really comical."
After retiring as an Army Air Corps' major after the war, Mix moved to Panama City and trained pilots at what is now Tyndall Air Force Base. Once out of the military, Mix sold mobile homes, travel trailers and ran Anchorage Mobile Home Park along 19th Street.
If someone came to the park with little money and in need of a home, Mix sometimes would let them stay there rent-free until financially righting themselves.
The experience of war had prepared Mix to run a successful business. "He was steady under pressure," Viola Mix said Monday.
After lunch Saturday, Mix sat alongside his wife at their kitchen table. He leaned to the left and said, "I feel terrible," Viola Mix said.
His arms went limp and Mix died on his wife's shoulder. He will be buried Wednesday morning at Kent-Forest Lawn Cemetery in Panama City.
Mike in Florida
USAF Aircrew Life Support (Retired)
"Your Life Is Our Business"
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