On Christmas Eve 1968, astronaut William Anders looked out the window of Apollo 8 as it came around the far side of the moon and saw the Earth rising above the lunar horizon. He grabbed a camera and took a photograph. That image — blue and white Earth hanging in the blackness over the grey lunar surface — became known as 'Earthrise.' It is one of the most reproduced photographs in history, credited with helping launch the modern environmental movement. The man who took it was also a fighter pilot who owned a P-51 Mustang.
Anders flew F-89 Scorpions and F-102 Delta Daggers with the 57th Fighter Interceptor Squadron — the Black Knights — from Keflavik, Iceland during the Cold War. Interceptor duty over the North Atlantic in some of the harshest weather on earth, scrambling to meet Soviet aircraft before they reached North American airspace. His callsign was Viking. When he later had a P-51D restored and repainted, he chose 57th FIS colors with high-visibility red panels — the markings of the jets he actually flew, not the famous war he was too young to fight in.
The restoration itself had a twist. Fellow Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman found the airframe and told Anders it had only 10 hours since a complete rebuild on the motor. What Anders discovered afterward was that it was 10 hours over 10 years — so turning 'The Silver Ghost' into 'Val-Halla' became a considerably more significant restoration than he had anticipated. The airframe was completely re-skinned. The name he chose carries three meanings: a tribute to his wife Valerie, a reference to Valhalla from Norse mythology honoring Iceland and his later service as U.S. Ambassador to Norway, and a detail only aviation people catch — his race number at Reno was 68. Apollo 8 flew in 1968.
Anders raced Val-Halla at Reno from 1997 to 1999, then donated it as the founding asset when he and Valerie established the Heritage Flight Museum in Burlington, Washington in 1996. The museum grew to 18 aircraft around that single P-51. In 2024 it was still flying Heritage Flight demos — a WWII Mustang in Cold War markings paired with modern Air Force jets, flown by the astronaut who photographed the Earth from the Moon.
On June 7, 2024, William Anders died flying a Beechcraft T-34 Mentor over the San Juan Islands near his Washington home. He entered a dive and did not recover. He was 90. His son Greg — a 23-year Air Force veteran who flew A-10s, F-15Es, and B-52s — is now the executive director of the Heritage Flight Museum and the one flying Val-Halla at airshows. The aircraft his father built around a half-restored airframe, named for his wife and his Viking callsign and his year around the Moon, is still flying.