A restored B-17 bomber named Liberty Belle will soon visit Maine.

The Georgia-based plane will fly into the Portland International Jetport on Thursday, Aug. 10, and stay through the weekend.

For a donation, people will have a chance to get up close to the plane, walking through one of only 14 remaining B-17s that still fly.

And for a $430 fee, people may purchase a 30-minute ride aboard the bomber.

“That’s one way we help keep the plane flying,” said Ray Fowler, who pilots the plane for the nonprofit Liberty Foundation. It costs an estimated $3,500 per hour to operate.

The plane, on its first-ever stop in Maine, spent Saturday and Sunday in Bangor, as crews prepared to take it into Canada. The plane is scheduled to make several provincial visits – including to the Labrador peninsula town of Goose Bay – before returning to Maine and stopping in Portland.

When he arrives, Fowler expects to see groups of veterans and their families, a sight he has grown accustomed to everywhere he goes.

“It dwarfs anything we’re facing in Iraq,” said Fowler, who also flies F-16 fighters in the Air National Guard.

During World War II, the Boeing company built an estimated 40,000 of the “flying fortresses.” Since each one carried a crew of 10, its number of alumni was huge.

So was the number of casualties.

“Four thousand of these planes were shot down,” he said. “That means 40,000 people were lost. That’s the real story.”

This particular plane never saw action. It was manufactured in the last days of the war and was rescued from the scrap heap in 1947, going through a series of owners until undergoing a $3.5 million restoration by aviation enthusiast Don Brooks.

Brooks, who created the Liberty Foundation, named the Liberty Belle after a plane that had seen combat in the air war over Europe. His dad had been a tail gunner on the original Belle, flying a total of 39 missions.

Brooks completed the renovation in 2004. Though new electronics were installed in the cockpit, the Liberty Belle still flies much as it did in 1945.

Its appearance, complete with the pinup girl on the nose, often startles the men who flew similar planes, Fowler said.

“They enjoy looking at the aircraft,” he said, even if they say little.

“A lot of those people never talked about it,” Fowler said.

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