I was watering the garden last Wednesday when I heard a thunderous noise from the sky. Living about 25 miles from Hartford’s Bradley International Airport, we’re used to seeing and hearing low-flying planes as they make their approach for landing. But this was unusually loud, as if an entire fleet of planes was in the air.

And then they appeared: a squadron of military planes flying in an impressive formation right over our house, engines roaring. I watched in awe as they soared at an altitude of about 1,000 feet.

I later learned six vintage World War II planes were performing a flyover across Connecticut in preparation for their trip across the Atlantic to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day. The planes flew over Pratt & Whitney’s East Hartford and Middletown facilities as a tribute to the company that built the mighty Wasp engine, instrumental in liberating Europe and ending the war.

The Douglas DC-3/C-47 Dakota aircraft, some of them participants in the original June 6, 1944, invasion, left the state Sunday to join more than 30 international aircraft in a D-Day reenactment, Daks over Normandy, in which they will drop 250 paratroopers in authentic Allied uniforms over the original drop zones in Normandy.

On D-Day, considered the beginning of the war’s end, nearly 160,000 Allied troops from the United States, Great Britain and Canada arrived by land, air and sea on five Normandy beaches to invade Nazi-occupied France and begin the liberation of Western Europe. About 13,000 American paratroopers of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions made night parachute drops on the eve of D-Day, followed by 3,937 glider troops flown in by day.

Marking the first time since World War II that this many of the amazing aircraft will assemble at the original drop zones, Daks over Normandy will truly be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The owners and operators of more than 30 C47s will fly in from the United States, Canada, Europe and as far away as Australia. On June 5, about 250 men and women will board the aircraft in the United Kingdom to fly across the English Channel and jump into Normandy.

I won’t be among the lucky spectators in France who will witness the amazing reenactment, but it certainly was a thrill to see them fly over — and to hear their mighty engines roar, much as they did on the eve of D-Day.

— Jan Hecht, senior editor