Story Update

One of the two pilots to land the plane in the field spoke exclusively to the West Seattle Herald Saturday, June 18. His wife, a crew member, also spoke to us:

Seven crew members and volunteers were uninjured when the B-17 “Liberty Belle”, a WWII-era bomber caught fire and landed in a field about 40 miles southwest of Chicago Monday, June 13. The fire occurred shortly after taking off at 9:30 a.m. The Liberty Foundation that owned and operated the aircraft had been giving rides at a small airport in Sugar Grove over the June 11-12 weekend and were on their way to Indianapolis.

Many "Flying Fortresses" were built southeast of West Seattle in Boeing Plant 2. This plane, built in 1945 at Lockheed in Burbank, California never saw combat, but was named after a B-17 that did.

One of two pilots who flew the Liberty Belle when the fire started, Capt. John Hess, spoke to the West Seattle Herald by phone from his home in Fayetteville, Georgia, near Atlanta Saturday, June 18. Hess flew the Liberty Belle since 2005 and is an active Delta Air Lines Captain with over 14,000 hours of flying experience. In the right seat was Bud Sittig, also with14,000 hours of flying time, in vintage and hi-performance aircraft. He is a retired Captain with Delta Air Lines.

“I'd like to get it out that the people of the Liberty Foundation are some of the best people I've ever dealt with my whole life from Don Brooks the founder, on down,” said Hess. “His father was a tail-gunner on the original Liberty Belle airplane. Most involved with the Foundation are volunteers, many from the airline industry with aviation backgrounds. Veterans come out and tell their stories while we show them the planes. Some were in their 20's or even teens when they in the war.

“The flight itself- our flight was totally uneventful until five minutes into the flight,” he recalled. “You just smelled a little something. My co-pilot Bud Sittig said it smelled a little ‘acrid’ was the word he used. I wasn't sure, but I immediately looked at the generator panel and started looking around for any signs of trouble. I can't remember if the T-6 told me first or if we saw a little smoke in the back of the airplane.”

To clarify, the Liberty Foundation had brought their B-17, a P-40, and a T-6 to that airfield for the weekend of flights. That Monday morning the P-40 had gotten a head start toward Indianapolis. The T-6 flew along side the B-17 with the intention of flying together to Indianapolis.

“The T-6 was following us to Indianapolis, what we call a ‘flight of two’, a formation,” Hess explained. Once the smoke was spotted, he and Sittig turned back toward the airport. “We were approximately seven miles away from the airport. We were practically lined up with one of their runways. Sittig was flying at that point. The T-6 pilot, Cullen Underwood, made the call that we were on fire. He said, ‘Put it on the ground. Put it on the ground’, very forcefully, which is not really a call you ever want to hear.

“Even though we were only about two or three minutes from the runway, it was taken out of our mind at that point. Cullen is a very experienced pilot, familiar with that airplane, so we knew. We now call him our ‘angel on our wing’. Without him, we may have pressed on to the airport and that could have turned out much worse.”

Hess was first to spot the field for the emergency landing.

In the cockpit where Settig was you can't see over the nose or across the cockpit vey well. I saw better from my side and could see I had a great field.  Bud discharged the fire bottles on the #2 engine. The fire control panel is on his side. Meanwhile, I shutdown and feathered the #2 engine.

“I had no worries about the airplane getting down. I wanted to make sure there were no power lines. We were using all our hands on the controls because it’s a very manual airplane.

“We don't have a PA system but have two other crew members, including my wife Fran and Chuck who saw the fire in the wing. They got the passengers seated and briefed- ‘Be ready for a landing and be ready to evacuate.’

“Once we touched down we splashed through a little bit of mud. That was good for us. It slowed us down. The plane can handle it. It has big huge tires. They were used to taking off from soggy fields in the war. Unfortunately it didn't benefit those fire trucks. That was our big dilemma. We were basically helpless on our own. The fire was right at the fuel tank and we needed to get away from it. We did have the time to throw some bags out, a few minutes. After that there was too much smoke.

“We heard the fire trucks right away but the marshal determined the field was impassable. They were held at the edge of the field. We kind of raised a little cain. Bud shouted, ‘C'Mon!’ The fire marshal got a little upset. We were frustrated. I don't want to blow it out of proportion. The fire chief is thinking, ‘Is there another way to get around the plane from another place in the field?’ Once they get stuck they're no good to anybody. He had his job to do. At O'Hare (Airport) you've got trucks four wheeling to go anywhere to get to anything. This was a rural fire department.

"I hope this event is not a black eye to B-17 operators. it is still one of the safest airplanes flying, as evidenced by its safety record. Its strong design gave us the ability to land safely.

"The investigation will take a while but I'm sure we will all use the findings to make our aircraft even safer." 

“We've flown together for years and I had confidence in John we'd pull through, and confidence in the plane,” said Fran, his wife, who, again, was a crewmember during the fire. “Of course things run through your mind when you have an inflight fire. It's never nice to look out a window and see a fire the size of a volleyball start. Actually it was one of the smoothest landings I ever had. There was no panic. You do what you have to do. Of course it's not far out of your mind thinking about your kids, but you handle it. You do what you need to do to land safely. It’s usually afterwards that you might stop to second guess.

It was aggravating to see all the news reports that the B-17 ‘crashed’”, she said. “We landed. We didn’t crash.

“The one thing that struck me was that there were just trees and the cornfield and nothing really around it to tell that you were in a modern era. I was like, ‘Wow. It must have been kind of what it looked like when they had to land off field in England during the war.’ I’m sure a lot of them had to stand back and watch their plane burn.”

Liberty Foundation volunteer and B-17 pilot Ron Gause told the West Seattle Herald the day of the crash that while the plane became engulfed with flames, he believed the fire department could have extinguished the fire upon the aircraft landing before the fuel ignited. He said the dramatic photos released on the news of the plane in flames and smoke were taken well after the plane had landed when approximately 800 gallons of aviation fuel ignited as a result of the electrical fire being permitted to spread.

Gause has piloted the Liberty Belle but was in Florida at the time of the ordeal. He was at Boeing Field when the same plane was offering flights over Seattle last April. He said he had been a firefighter for 17 years and disagreed with the firefighters' call not to drive their truck into the field for fear the field was too moist and the truck would get stuck, which he said was their explanation.

"To me it was incomprehensible that they did not want to drive close to the landed plane," Gause said of the fire department serving Oswego. "If your fire truck needs to get through the mud you still try, then if it gets stuck, have a tow truck get it out.”

Gause contacted us a few days later and said he wanted to soften his criticism of the fire department because, in part, more information had surfaced about the department’s effort to penetrate the muddy field, and he was not there to judge for himself.

"This is not the end of the Liberty Foundation," said Gause. "We have another B-17 in its early stage of restoration, the one that came out of Lake Dyke in Labrador, Canada. The wings are in the process of being restored. All the parts of that aircraft are serviceable. We're a good ways away from having that airplane ready to fly. We may try to buy another B-17 assuming there is one of the only 11 that survived in North America for sale. We just don't know at these point."