Long Islanders who were all set to step into the shoes of D-Day paratroopers on Saturday will have to wait until summer to take flight on the American Airpower Museum's Douglas C-47 transport in East Farmingdale.
Museum officials said Thursday that rain and low cloud ceilings on Saturday and the Sunday rain date led them to postpone the three scheduled flights at Republic Airport until July 23.
Ten participants on each of the flights were to experience what GIs had gone through in Operation Overlord during the June 6, 1944, invasion of Normandy.
Billed as a "one-of-a-kind immersive educational experience," the "living history flight" allows paying guests the chance to experience history firsthand, short of combat itself.
In July guests will don combat gear, including authentic military field jackets, helmets and packs — everything short of a combat rifle and parachute. They also will be handed an identification card of a member of the 101st Airborne, Company E Parachute Infantry Regiment — the fabled Easy Company, as portrayed in Band of Brothers.
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After attending a full preflight briefing with historian Robert Scarabino, the participants will board the flight piloted by Capt. David Wigley, who'll fly them out over the South Shore barrier beaches to Robert Moses State Park. They won't jump. Once back at Republic, the participants aboard each flight will deplane onto the tarmac outside the museum hangar to learn their fate.
"They'll learn what these young men endured to get to that specific moment in time, when they got into a C-47, flew to Normandy, jumped into the darkness as part of the D-Day invasion — and did what they were asked to do," Scarabino said. "The unselfish courage, the valor, the heroism. We can't ever know what they really went through. But the highest form of reverence is remembering. And that's the wow factor here. To experience what it must've been like, then to find out."
Capt. David Wigley stands by the C-47 that will be flown for the "living history flight" at the American Airpower Museum in East Farmingdale. Credit: Newsday / J. Conrad Williams Jr.
Some will learn the paratrooper whose ID they hold died in Normandy. Or, later at Bastogne or Market Garden in the Netherlands. Others will learn their GI was wounded.
Some will learn that soldier survived the war.
Many will be moved to tears, Scarabino said.
The Douglas C-47 was first introduced as the DC-3 passenger liner in 1935, just 32 years after the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. It was used to deliver troops and transport supplies in World War II. The specific plane flown by the American Airpower Museum was delivered to the British Royal Air Force — the RAF — in 1945. Although the plane didn't see service in WWII, it was used to deliver goods to Germans under Soviet rule in the postwar Berlin Airlift.
A full-time pilot for American Airlines, Wigley says he loves flying the C-47 because of its history.
"You wonder over all those years who sat in the same seat I sit in when I fly it," Wigley, 63, of Lake Grove, said. "Young people today don't realize what young people did back then … They put their heads down, did what they had to do. They must've been terrified … I feel a great sense of honor flying this plane. Especially now, that the people involved are dying away, that they're mostly all gone. We have to keep reminding people of the sacrifices all those folks made."
John Valenti, a reporter at Newsday since 1981, has been honored nationally by the Associated Press and Society of the Silurians for investigative, enterprise and breaking news reporting, as well as column writing, and is the author of “Swee'pea,” a book about former New York playground basketball star Lloyd Daniels. Valenti is featured in the Emmy Award-winning ESPN 30-for-30 film “Big Shot.”
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