Southern Cross

Yesterday I mentioned that I bought a Groupon for a plane ride in a WWII plane over the SuperBowl festivities.....well here it is! It's a Douglas C-47 Dakota (Southern Cross).

Here I am walking out to the plane for our ride! There are only 16 seats on the plane, so it was a small group of people on each flight.

The Southern Cross logo is on the nose of the plane....

I was wondering what these circles on the windows were....turns out they are gun ports - so they can shoot things out all of the windows!

And these skulls represent the 5 jumpers that didn't open their parachutes (this was a paratrooper plane)......3 of them left behind suicide notes and the other 2 are a mystery.

This was our 'docent' if you will - he explained the whole history of the plane. It was commissioned in 1941 by TWA - as a passenger plane, but due to the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, it was pressed into military service.

After the war, it changed hands many times - even once being owned by the President of Mexico and he turned it into some luxurious bachelor pad with a full bathroom, couches, etc. Then it was a commercial plane and finally it became a skydiving plane, so they stripped everything out again to make it as light as possible for jumps.

All aboard!

I decided to sit in the front row - here was my view.....a direct line right into the cockpit!

Here's the co-pilot, getting ready to take off!

This was the view behind me.......

It made me kind of nervous because the plane was super loud (they gave us ear protection) and it vibrated quite a bit...Also, I saw all of this exposed wiring above the cockpit.....scary!

It was really cool to see what people wrote on parts of the plane's interior - all servicemen wrote where/when they served. It was so neat to read that!

And we were honored to have a veteran on our flight that day - he was in the Army in WWII. He said that he flew in planes just like the one we were in - he made 92 successful jumps! WOW!