On 4 April 1943, a US Army Air Forces B-24D Liberator named Lady Be Good failed to return from a bombing mission to Naples. It was assumed lost in the Mediterranean. Fifteen years later, in 1958, oil prospectors flying over the Libyan desert spotted an aircraft lying in the sand, hundreds of kilometres inland.
What happened on the flight
It was the crew's first mission. Returning at night from Naples, they used a radio direction-finding bearing to navigate home to their base at Soluch in Libya. The bearing they obtained placed them approaching the coast.
They were in fact already past it. A strong tailwind had pushed the aircraft far faster than expected, and the direction-finding equipment gave a bearing that was ambiguous — it indicated the direction of the station without distinguishing whether the aircraft was approaching or had already overflown it.
Believing they were still over the sea and approaching the coast, they kept flying south, deeper into the Sahara. When fuel ran low, the crew bailed out into the desert, believing they were over water close to shore. The unmanned aircraft continued and made a remarkably intact belly landing on the flat desert floor.
The condition it was found in
When the wreckage was located in 1958, the preservation was extraordinary. The dry desert had protected it: a working radio, thermos flasks with drinkable liquid, and machine guns that could still be fired. The aircraft had broken into two sections on landing but was otherwise complete.
What was missing were the crew.
What happened to the men
Searches over the following years, prompted by the discovery, found the remains of most of the crew scattered across the desert to the north. Diaries recovered with them recorded what had happened.
Eight of the nine had landed and grouped up. They began walking north, believing the coast was close. It was more than a hundred kilometres away. They walked for days on almost no water, in a desert where daytime temperatures make that survival window very short. The diary entries record their progress and their deteriorating condition until they stop.
Three men, in an extraordinary effort, covered a distance far beyond what survival estimates would suggest was possible. One crew member's remains were never located.
Why it is remembered
The case is unusual in that the aircraft was found in near-flying condition while its crew had died in the sand. It became a study in navigation error — specifically in the ambiguity of the direction-finding equipment of the era, and in what happens when a crew's mental model of their position is wrong and every subsequent decision is made from it.
Parts of the aircraft were recovered and studied. Some were later fitted to other aircraft, and a persistent story that those aircraft then suffered misfortune is folklore rather than record. The main wreckage remained in the desert for decades and was eventually moved to a Libyan military base.