B-17 Bomber Flying Fortress – The Queen Of The Skies About this B-17 website

The history behind b17flyingfortress.de

My name is Jing Zhou, born in China and living in Germany since 1991. I am founder of this website about the legendary B-17 Flying Fortress.

And it all started with the movie “Memphis Belle”. I saw this movie in the mid-1990s. I was 14 or 15 years old and still went to school. At the end of the film, the Memphis Belle flew its 25th and last mission on 17 May 1943. My curiosity was aroused and I wanted to know if the film is based on a true story or a Hollywood story.

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So I researched on the Internet. This is easier today than it was then. There were at that time no Flatrates, certainly not DSL. The dial-up was still via analog 54k modem and it was calculated every minute in the Internet. And of course, the internet was not filled with as much information as it is today.

But I was lucky and found the confirmation that the film “Memphis Belle” is actually based on a true story. And that the aircraft type is the Boeing B-17. This film became my absolute favorite movie. I watched it two times a day (video recording). Overall, I’ve determined it already 100 times.

From then on, I wanted to learn more. More about the Memphis Belle, more about the B-17, more about the air war, more about the hunting aircraft. Ultimately, my fascination with the B-17 remained.

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Noseart & serial numbers

Every time I saw a photo of a B-17 with a noseart, I noted it. And it also wrote – as far as is known – the serial number. However still without sorting or order. Very simple in a text editor. One could say that the first ideas on a B-17 database at that time in my own children’s room originated.

Contact to Robert K. Morgan – Pilot of the original Memphis Belle

Over time, I collected as much as possible over the B-17. One day I was in the modeling business and found a model set from the B-17 “Memphis Belle”. And as you can imagine, I bought it. At that time, I had bought many aircraft models and built in my children’s room: Me-109, B-25, He-111, Ju-88, P-51, P-47, Avro Lancaster.

One day, the original documentary on the Memphis Belle on TV and in the TV newspaper was the image of 4 crewmembers. However, without name. I cut it out and kept it carefully. Again I became curious and wanted to know who is in the photo to see. I do not remember how I came up with the idea or where the address was found. In any case, I wrote Robert K. Morgan, pilot of the Memphis Belle and asked him to identify the 4 people. I also sent him two prints from my model of Memphis Belle and asked him to sign one and send it back to me.

The website version 1.0 til today.

All this meant that I then started creating a website. It was the first German-language website about the B-17 Flying Fortress. Even before Wikipedia. ?

Interested how it looks in the past?
Visit: https://web.archive.org/web/20020515000000*/http://b17flyingfortress.de

The first version went online in 2000. Still under the domain b17fortress.de. The first versions were still static HTML pages. Then it was a page with PHP. Then it became from about 2012 a little quiet for the next 5 years and since the end of March 2017 the website is based on WordPress with a specially designed WordPress theme of me with the attention to the database.

I’ve got to feel like it again.

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Dorfverein Alschbach e.V
13. November 2023 access_time 10:30

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