Palm Springs Air Museum by Neil Mouneimne
	Miss Angela buzzes the field on her second circuit. On the first circuit, the crew landed her and apparently put on the brakes - much to the crowd's disappointment. Just when everyone started to wonder what went wrong and look away, she soared back up again in a last-minute touch-and-go. One of the crew observers was really surprised, saying that doing a touch-and-go on the B-17 is quite difficult. The B-17 casts quite an ominous shadow as it lumbers back through the gate after an impressive flight. Miss Angela didn't actually see combat in the war, as she was assigned to be a general's personal transport. The B-17's were popular as VIP transport because of their great stability and self-defense capability. Finished with taxiing, the crew runs up the engines for a minute before shutting down to the exuberant applause of the spectators. Actually, the pilot got the tailwheel a little off-road while bringing it around, but it didn't seem to mind at all. Click to continue		"Doc" in the foreground and "Sleepy" in the background. Each of the engines was curiously named after one of the Seven Dwarves. But these dwarves had terrible table manners. They would drool long strands of oil all over the concrete when they weren't running. One of the pilots recalled their old saying "If it ain't leaking, you better not go flying." Pacific theater pilot and cohort. Just as the sun was setting, they rolled out the Tigercat and ran up its engines for about ten minutes. The irony is that the two smaller engines of the Tigercat were much more raucous than the four engines of the B-17. The engines were a lot more temperamental, too. The Tigercat's engines also blew copious quantities of smoke at each startup. What this picture doesn't show, is how incredibly narrow the fuselage is. In fact, it's much narrower than the engines, and probably rates up there with the HueyCobra in frontal profile that way.
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