America Built 12,731 B-17s. Just Three Still Fly.

You hear a B-17 before you see it. Four big radial engines, slightly out of sync, a sound that makes people at an airport fence stop talking and look up.

Most people assume that sound is fairly common. The Flying Fortress is one of the best-known American bombers of World War II, and there seems to be one at every air show and veterans’ day flyover.

There isn’t. The real number is tiny, it has been shrinking for fifteen years, and the reasons have less to do with age than with money, metal fatigue and three crashes. Here is the count, where each survivor lives, and why the rest stay on the ground.

How Many B-17s Are Still Flying?

Three, as of September 2026. Two are in the United States and one is in England, out of 12,731 Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses built by Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed’s Vega division before production ended in May 1945.

All three are late-war B-17Gs, the variant with the chin turret under the nose.

Name	Serial / registration	Base	Operator
Sentimental Journey	44-83514 / N9323Z	Mesa, Arizona	Commemorative Air Force, Airbase Arizona
Ye Olde Pub	44-8543 / N3701G	Madras, Oregon	Erickson Aircraft Collection
Sally B	44-85784 / G-BEDF	Duxford, England	B-17 Preservation (a charity)

Sentimental Journey is the easiest one to see. Its 2026 tour ran from El Paso in April to St. George, Utah, in early October, and it sells rides.

Sally B is the last airworthy B-17 in Europe and has been flying in Britain for 50 years.

Where the Rest of the Survivors Are

Roughly 46 complete B-17 airframes still exist, according to the survivor census kept by the B-17 historian and parts supplier AeroVintage. Three fly. The other 43 sit in museums, in storage, or in hangars where volunteers are trying to get them back into the air.

Status	Airframes
Static display (including one being restored for display)	26
In maintenance or rebuild, aiming to fly again	8
In storage	6
On display, described as near airworthy	3
Flying	3
Total complete airframes	46

That middle group matters. A B-17 in a museum is not a spare flying aircraft waiting for a pilot. Even the eight airframes actively being worked on toward flight are multi-year projects, and some have been in that column for a long time.

Why So Few Fly: The Wings Are 80 Years Old

The single biggest threat to the flying fleet is structural. In 2021, an inspection on one B-17 found that the lower fitting on its left front wing spar had completely separated where the wing meets the fuselage, and the matching joint on the right side was cracked.

The FAA responded with Airworthiness Directive 2023-10-04, effective June 1, 2023, requiring inspections of the wing terminal-to-spar chord joints on every B-17E, F and G. Operators had already grounded their aircraft voluntarily before it was published.

The inspection itself was cheap: the FAA estimated 25 work-hours per aircraft. The fix is not. When the Mid America Flight Museum opened up the wings of its B-17 We The People, formerly Thunderbird, it found that repair was not an option and both inner wings needed new rear spar tubes.

New B-17 spar tubes are not an off-the-shelf part. The Warbird Shop in Madras, Oregon, built a fixture to make them, and by September 2025 had fitted a newly manufactured spar, a first for the B-17 community. The museum said then that the aircraft could be reassembled within two years.

The engines are the other half of the problem. Each B-17 carries four Wright R-1820 Cyclone radials of about 1,200 horsepower, and in 2021 a Commemorative Air Force loadmaster put the cost of overhauling just one at up to $95,000.

Why So Few Fly: Every Hour Has to Be Paid For

In 2021, two of Sentimental Journey’s loadmasters estimated that a B-17 costs around $2,000 an hour to operate, $1,000 of it fuel. That figure covers flying, not the hangar, the parts hunt, the tour logistics or the next engine.

Rides are how Sentimental Journey closes the gap. Former military aircraft like the B-17 fly in the FAA’s limited or experimental categories, and carrying paying passengers in them takes a special exemption known as the Living History Flight Experience.

The FAA’s own policy says these exemptions exist so owners can “offset the considerable restoration, maintenance and operational costs.”

On its 2026 tour, Sentimental Journey sold six waist seats at $475 and two nose seats at $850. A full flight grosses $4,550, and it only happens when the weather, the engines and the tour schedule all cooperate.

That dependence can sink a museum. When the Michigan Flight Museum sold its B-17 Yankee Lady in 2024, it said it had become “unrealistically dependent” on the bomber’s revenue and could no longer ensure its flying future. The buyer, Sacramento collector Charles Somers, reportedly paid in the $14 million range.

Sally B shows the other model. It is not part of the Imperial War Museum’s collection at Duxford, where it is based. It runs on donations, sponsorship and a supporters’ club, maintained by volunteer engineers and flown by volunteer professional pilots.

How the Flying Fleet Shrank

Only fifteen years ago, several more B-17s were touring the United States. The fleet did not fade away gradually. It lost aircraft one event at a time, and each loss removed an airframe that cannot be replaced.

The investigations that followed were blunt. The NTSB faulted the Nine-O-Nine pilot’s handling of the aircraft after an engine shutdown, and cited poor engine maintenance and the foundation’s ineffective safety management as contributing factors.

For Dallas, the NTSB’s final report in December 2024 blamed inadequate prebriefing by the air boss and the event organizer, which left the separation between aircraft relying solely on real-time directions and see-and-avoid. The Commemorative Air Force, whose affiliate operated Texas Raiders, dropped flying displays from its 2023 Veterans Day event.

Why Some Lists Say Five or Six

Counts also differ because “airworthy” and “flying” are not the same thing. An aircraft can hold a valid registration and still sit in a hangar for years awaiting spar work, engines or money.

The Movie Memphis Belle, the B-17 that played the title role in the 1990 film, is the clearest example. The Palm Springs Air Museum has spent several years overhauling its engines and propellers and completing the spar inspections, and unveiled it in November 2024 as returning to flight.

Our newest 2026 sources still count only two B-17s flying in the US, so it is not in our count until it is confirmed back in the air.

Even when it returns, it will not sell seats. The museum plans to fly it to events and air shows with its own crews, with no paying passengers.

Will the Number Go Back Up?

Probably, slowly. AeroVintage lists eight B-17s being worked on with the goal of flying again, including the Movie Memphis Belle, We The People, the rebuilt Yankee Lady and a Collings Foundation airframe in Florida.

None of those projects has a firm date, and warbird restorations routinely slip by years. A fair reading is that the count could climb to four or five later this decade, while any single accident, grounding or sale could take it the other way.

What will not change is the direction of the underlying numbers. No one is building new B-17s, so every return to flight has to come out of the 43 that are already on the ground, one set of spar tubes and four engines at a time.

So the next time four radials rumble over an air show, look closely. You are watching one of three, kept in the air by a museum budget, a ticket queue or a charity appeal, and by volunteers who will spend the following week putting it right again.