Warplane Heritage Museum gets WWII plane

There’s a lot of excitement tonight at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum. The latest addition to its collection flew into town Thursday evening and brought a lot of history with it.

When you see this plane on the screen, it really doesn’t show its age. But this plane played an important role in one of the key events of the Second World War.

The plane arrived in Hamilton after a flight from Ottawa, where it was kept stored in a hangar for the past few years.

It had been used by the federal environment department until fairly recently. But has now been donated to the warplane museum.

A pleasure for the pilots who flew it here.

David Hills: “The flight was very smooth, very direct — everything worked as it should have and we got the warplane back on schedule. With the history that she has, it’s a privilege to be able to fly it.”

The plane is a DC-3, known during the war as a Dakota or C-47 — like the Dakota the museum already has as part of its collection.

It was a wartime transport. Big enough to carry a jeep and paratroopers jumping into battle zones. It was used by Britain’s Royal Air Force and then the RCAF.

David said: “I believe that even Winston Churchill and General Eisenhower said that the C-47 was one of the five things that helped win the war.”

The thing about this particular plane is that it’s seventy years old or more, and took part in the allied invasion of Europe on D-Day.

So it’s remarkable to think that on D-Day, June 6, 1944, paratroopers were actually jumping out of this plane into France.”

On that day, the plane was painted with the three white stripes for D-Day so it could identified as an allied aircraft.

It was also know for its unusual name.

David said: “This particular aircraft was known as ‘kwitcherbitchin’. Apparently one of the pilots had a tendency to be a bit of a whiner. So the crew chief decided to put him in his place a little bit, decided to put a little slogan under the cockpit to let everyone know whose aircraft it was.”

And even at its advanced age, it was built so well that it’s still flying, along with other Dakotas from that time.

The plane is going to be repainted in its wartime colours, along with its name from the war.