MADISON – The way most adults feel about hopping on a bicycle years after their last ride, Chuck Strein feels about zipping around at 15,000 feet in a military bomber: He never forgets.

Well, almost never.

&#8220I felt a little awkward,” said Strein, of Ridgeland, who was back behind the controls of a B-25 Mitchell bomber Monday for the first time since his stint as a World War II flight trainer at Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma, courtesy of the Collings Foundation’s Wings of Freedom tour at Bruce Campbell Field Airport in Madison. &#8220I haven’t flown a plane with a propeller in more than 50 years. It doesn’t fly like any of the airplanes I flew afterward.”

The tour, in the midst of its annual trek to airfields in more than 120 cities, flew in three bombers Monday – a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, a Consolidated B-24 Liberator and the B-25 Mitchell – from Birmingham for their three-day stop in Madison, where they’ll be on display for tours and sometimes airborne for half-hour flights through Wednesday. Strein and another B-25 passenger, fellow Air Force vet Bill Grosvenor, avoided the $425 fee to go up in the old model by accepting an invitation to board as it left Alabama, but they were hardly the only area veterans in search of high-flying nostalgia on the tour’s first day in Mississippi.

&#8220You’d better believe I want to fly in it again, if I can get a ride,” said Bill Phelps of Ridgeland, who worked as a B-17 and B-29 flight trainer in Gulfport during World War II and the Korean Conflict. &#8220I’d love to fly in that 17 again.”

The B-17 and B-24 bombers are among the most recognizable from World War II, mostly for their roles in leveling strategic targets like aircraft factories, ammunitions plants and oil refineries to cripple enemy logistics from 20,000 feet. The B-25 is best known as the craft of choice in the famed &#8220Doolittle Raid,” the April 1942 retaliation attack on Japan that ended in the crash-landing of eight American pilots, and the subsequent execution of three, but served as the first successful bombing of Tokyo.

The widespread dismantling of planes for scrap after the war, however, has left modern aviation fans bereft of hands-on examples of those pilots’ experiences: the foundation’s Boeing B-17, capable of seating up to nine, is one of only nine B-17s in flying condition in the United States, and the foundation’s B-24, big enough to hold eight people, is the only one of the original 19,000 of its kind still capable of taking off as it did in its heyday.

It’s that sense of history, said Collings Foundation Chief Executive Officer Rob Collings, that keeps the tour stops from resembling exclusively veterans’ clubs meetings.

&#8220It’s mostly young people who want the experience of flying in one of these planes,” said Collings, son of the Massachusetts-based nonprofit’s founder, Bob Collings. &#8220You’d think it would be mostly veterans, but it’s a younger generation now.”

Among that demographic Monday was 14-year-old Chris Davis of Ridgeland, who said he inherited a love of planes from his father and grandfather, a former shipbuilder. The Olde Towne Middle School student heard about the tour during a biplane ride on Sunday, he said, and met the bombers Monday afternoon with his dad.

&#8220For the outside of the plane being so big, you’d be surprised how small it is inside,” Chris said after maneuvering through the tight, difficult entrance and crowded fuselage of the B-17. &#8220I’d hate to be inside if it was going down.”

It was a sentiment William &#8220Buzz” Fitzroy of Clinton could relate to. Fitzroy’s bomber jacket displayed the miniature yellow bombs and black swastikas earned during 35 B-17 missions over Germany and dozens of hits on Nazi planes, a career that included being shot down three times and enduring one stint as a prisoner of the Third Reich. It was that experience, perhaps, that explained why Fitzroy was less enthusiastic than his friend Bill Phelps about reliving his 800 or so hours piloting the Flying Fortress – as a passenger, anyway.

&#8220Unless they let me fly it, I don’t want to go up,” he said.

Less squeamish was Dan Fordice, who met the B-17 from Tallulah-Vicksburg Regional Airport and escorted it in to Campbell Field in a T-6 Texan Trainer only one day after crash-landing an amphibious SeaRay plane into the Mississippi River, escaping the wreckage underwater and swimming to shore with his wife, Ann Claire. Monday night, the aviation enthusiast said he was disappointed he hadn’t gotten to take his first ride in a bomber during Day One, because he would be out of town today.

&#8220I had to get back on that horse,” said Fordice, son of former Gov. Kirk Fordice and principal in Fordice Construction Co. &#8220I think this is a wonderful experience that people ought to have.”

He was not so quick, however, to recommend his harrowing experience Sunday afternoon. As for his SeaRay, resting somewhere in the Mississippi?.

&#8220They won’t find it,” he said.