On Tuesday, I drove to Waterbury-Oxford Airport to see the Experimental Aircraft Association's restored B-17 Aluminum Overcast bomber plane and to hopefully get some excellent footage of an interesting subject.
I took the ground tour, which consisted of walking through the interior of the plane and hearing old war stories from a couple of veteran pilots that were on board to re-live their memories of those months spent aboard the B-17.
I did pretty good with the exterior shots, but access to the interior of the plane was through a small hatch that I could barely fit through--much less me and a video camera at the same time. I climbed up into the nose of the aircraft, into a space behind where the front gunner sits and did my first shots of the interior. In the cockpit, a WWII veteran was recounting the first time he shot an enemy plane. I got some footage from my sub-floor vantage point, and then decided to get up to the next level for more interesting views. That's when the age-old SNAFU happened: once on the deck, my thumb must have hit the REC button without my knowing it, and the next 12-15 minutes of activity was never recorded. I did however get lots of shots of the floor and people's feet.
What happened? Between the "spam in a can" factor of me being too big to fit through the bulkheads in this plane, coupled with the fact that there was no room for me to hold the EX1 out in front of me without bumping another person or part of the airframe, I found myself working blind in the cockpit, being unable to look at the LCD and confirm that I was recording. Frankly, I was more concerned at this point with maneuvering my whale-like self around in this impossibly-tight space without bumping my head or the EX1 on something. I just took it for granted that the camera was in REC mode. It wasn't. Oops. Not until I got out to the radio room, which was behind the bomb bay, another tight catwalk which I almost could not squeeze through, did I finally notice that I was in REC when I thought I was on standby. A brief sense of "oh crap" ensued, but I just went on recording what I could and didn't realize the extent of the material not recorded.
As I got further to the back of the plane, where there was more open space surrounding the ball turret gunner, did I really have enough room to position the camera in front of me for proper operating posture. But I was a bit disappointed that I'd lost all those good stories about the crew getting sick on a mission and vomiting and having diarrhea and having to tie off their pants cuffs to confine the mess... well darn, it was a good story!
I did get some other stories though, and it was not a total loss. I'd planned to return the next day for a repeat tour to hopefully get it right and maybe get some more dialog with visiting vets, but my daughter was very sick with a fever all night and I had to stay home the following morning to take care of her. Oh well, maybe the boys from Oskosh will return again next year, and maybe then I will take a ride on the B-17 and film the whole event.
