WW II plane heading to Normandy for June 6 commemoration

The plane has no fixed seats, no flight attendants, no in-flight movie and no bathroom. It is not heated, insulated or pressurized. And on its last tour over France, somebody tried to shoot it down.

But on Thursday, a septuagenarian war horse known as the Whiskey 7 will take off from a grass airstrip in central New York to attempt its most ambitious post-armistice mission: a trans-Atlantic crossing to pay tribute to the young Americans who went to war in Europe and those who never came home.

The plane — a twin-engine, propeller-driven C-47 military transport — will cross the famously frigid North Atlantic for the 70th anniversary of the storming of Normandy during World War II, when the Whiskey 7 was a lead plane in a Britain-based group that dropped paratroopers over coastal France. This time around, its crew will navigate a 3,600-mile-long — and presumably flak-free — route, making refueling stops in Maine, Labrador, Greenland, Iceland and Scotland before buzzing the skies over Omaha Beach in early June.