It was our first night cross-country flight in the B-24, beginning at our base in Topeka, Kansas, on a triangular flight plan across the American Midwest. The aircraft was one in a pool of training B-24s and we’d not flown this particular one before.
We took off in the dark after only a gentle warning of a cold front we would fly over. Heading north, as we approached South Dakota, the weather got rough and wet snow appeared. We began to ice up. Then came the sporadic thump of rime ice thrown by the props against the fuselage. And then, I made one of the classic mistakes one should never make: I took my eyes off the instrument panel and began looking out the side window at the snow and patchy ice on the wing leading edge.
