103-year-old WWII B-17 pilot still tells stories at Seattle museum

Richard “Dick” Nelms still spends part of each week in front of a B-17 at The Museum of Flight in Seattle, telling visitors about the war he flew in more than eight decades ago. At 103, the retired Army Air Forces pilot has become part of the museum’s living collection, one of the few firsthand witnesses left to explain what World War II looked and felt like from inside a Flying Fortress.

Museum records identify Nelms as Richard “Dick” Alan Nelms, born Feb. 17, 1923, in Cleveland, Ohio. His family later moved to Niagara Falls, New York, and then Columbia, South Carolina. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army Air Forces in the European Theater as a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress copilot and pilot with the 710th Bombardment Squadron of the 447th Bombardment Group.

Nelms’ path to the museum began after personal loss. After his wife, Laurel, died in 2014, he followed his son’s advice and became a volunteer at The Museum of Flight. By 2020, the museum described him as one of its history storytellers, giving talks about his wartime experiences to visitors. Today, the museum says he continues those talks every Saturday in front of the museum’s B-17, where his presence links aviation hardware to the human cost of war and the discipline required to fly bombing missions over Europe.

His postwar life also widened the meaning of his service. The museum says Nelms worked for years as a professional artist and created the official seal of the State of Washington. On Jan. 6, 2024, The Museum of Flight featured him in an Art+Flight event titled “Dick Nelms: Veteran and Artist,” underscoring how his life bridged combat aviation, civic symbolism and public memory.

The museum has also marked Nelms as one of the Washington veterans whose service deserves formal recognition. On May 10, 2019, it hosted a French Legion of Honor presentation honoring four Washington-state World War II veterans, including Nelms, then 96 and identified as a B-17 pilot.

For The Museum of Flight, Nelms’ weekly storytelling fits a larger educational mission: preserve aviation history by putting visitors in contact with the people who made it. As more war veterans disappear from public life, that work becomes more than remembrance. It becomes a transfer of memory from the generation that lived it to the generations that will only know it through museums, archives and the steady voice of a 103-year-old pilot beside his plane.