THUNDER BAY - A former military aircraft that dropped paratroopers to help support the D-Day invasion was open to the public on Saturday.
A DC-3 plane flown by the Royal Air Force during the Second World War was restored earlier this year, and hosted by Thunder Bay Aviation at the Thunder Bay International Airport for public tours on Saturday.
Glenn Warner, a former diamond miner came by to check out the very plane he jumped out of 19 years ago.
“You stand at the doorway and wonder what you’re doing there. Once you get out and have that free fall you don’t realize how fast you’re going until you see the earth moving closer towards you,” Warner said.
Warner was working in Yellowknife when his wife told him about the opportunity to dive out of the plane.
“When she came and told me, I said, ‘Gee, I’d love to try that.’
“She thought I was crazy,” Warner said.
The plane was built by the Douglas Aircraft Company at its Oklahoma City plant in January 1944, quickly joining the Royal Air Force in Montreal one month later and subsequently heading overseas.
On D-Day, the plane’s mission was to deploy paratroopers to destroy bridges, limiting the ability of German reinforcements to reach the beaches of Normandy.
The plane was repurposed as a passenger plane from Trans-Canada airways, the precursor to Air Canada, from 1947 to 1967.
Now it is transported all around North America for display shows.
Randy Morine took the tour on Saturday and said being in the aircraft is quite different from seeing it in the sky.
“I can’t believe these things fly,” he said. “It’s a vintage of the aircraft. Nowadays everything is amazingly fast. This here is a prop plane and seeing these fly are truly amazing.
“It’s definitely not Westjet that’s for sure.”
