The FReeper Foxhole Remembers the Recovery of the "Lady Be Good" crew - Oct. 10th, 2003

various educational sources ^

[snippy_about_it]

Good morning w/w. Okay, I'll bite on your tagline. LOL.

[SAMWolf]

Hi Manna!

[manna]

Hi SAM

[snopercod]

...wouldn't gravity tell you at least if you were leaning a particular way or upside down.

No. A body doesn't know the difference between the force induced by gravity and the force induced by acceleration. If you are in the dark or in the clouds and lose all your instruments, you are almost certainly going to die.

Typically, your body will tell you that you are leaning to one side, so you correct by rolling the wings to the other. This is how the classic "death spiral" starts. When you notice you are starting to lose altitude, you pull back on the stick to raise the nose, but all that does is tighten the turn and increase your rate of descent. Three minutes or less till you auger in.

[w_over_w]

1957 Pres Eisenhower apologizes to finance minister of Ghana, Komla Agbeli Gbdemah, after he is refused service in a Dover, Del, restaurant

Those Delaware rednecks . . .

[Darksheare]

Morning.

[snippy_about_it]

That's horrifying. I never want to be there.

Thank you for your input on that. eek!

[SAMWolf]

You're right about Direction finding being complicated.

I've only had to use it in computer games. Flight sims and Sub sims (and those are simplified). It is confusing to someone like me who's weak in math. Thanks for the detailed explainations, when I read it I can grasp the concept, it's rememebering it without having it in front of me that's tough.

[SAMWolf]

Murphys Law of the day...(Richard's Complementary Rules of Ownership)
1 If you keep anything long enough you can throw it away.
2 If you throw anything away, you will need it as soon as it is no longer accessible.

That has happend to me more times than I care to think about.

[SAMWolf]

Morning US Army EOD.

Thanks for providing more in fo on navigation, not exactly one of my stronpoints. Sure is nice to know that there's always someone at the Foxhole who can provide more info when people have questions.

[SAMWolf]

Morning Feather.

[SAMWolf]

Morning Prof Engineer. It's hard to imagine the feelings the crew must have had as they realized that the chances for rescue were declining each day.

[SAMWolf]

Morning w_over-w.

It's good to hear about stories like this, where missing military men are finally found and laid to rest.

[Valin]

I hate Delaware Nazis

Apologies to Elwood Blues.

[SAMWolf]

You're welcome.

[SAMWolf]

BTW, that's not me in that graphic. LOL!

[snopercod]

If you want to read a hair-raising story about flying in the clouds without instruments, here it is:

No Pisco Sours for Me, Thanks! by John Deakin

[snippy_about_it]

Thanks for the link, as soon as I get home tonight I am going to read it.

[Valin]

At the risk of dating myself, Twilight Zone did a story about the "Lady Be Good"

This is Africa, 1943. War spits out its violence overhead and the sandy graveyard swallows it up. Her name is King Nine, B-25, medium bomber, Twelfth Air Force. On a hot, still morning she took off from Tunisia to bomb the southern tip of Italy. An errant piece of flak tore a hole in a wing tank and, like a wounded bird, this is where she landed, not to return on this day, or any other day.

Captain James Embry seems to be the only survivor of a bomber that crashed into a hot desert somewhere in Africa. The problem is that none of the other members of his crew are anywhere near the scene of the crash. Embry crawls into the belly of the downed craft to search for them, but he finds nothing. Shouting out their names doesn't work as there is no response for his troubles. Embry tries to stay calm and search for answers. The first thing he has to figure out is the location of the rest of his crew. He floats the possibility of him being unconscious for hours, and the rest of the crew went for help. But then why didn't they bring him along? There's no luck in trying to contact anybody on the radio. The captain knows that he has to keep the crew alive since he's in charge of them, even though he has no idea where they are. Embry finds some evidence of his crew lying in the sand outside the plane. A canteen that reads "Kline" is found by Embry, and he starts to yell Kline's name.

He also yells out how stupid Kline is for forgetting his canteen in the desert. When he stops to take a drink from the canteen, something causes a look of surprise to flash across Embry's face. Sitting in the cockpit of the plane is Blake, one of the members of Embry's crew. Embry starts to rush toward the cockpit, yelling at Blake, but when Embry gets close to the cockpit, Blake disappears. Embry is heartbroken because he is responsible for the crew and he can't find them. Eventually, Embry gives up on trying to contact anybody over the radio. Then he considers the fact that this whole thing might be a hallucination or a dream. The one things he knows for certain is that he saw Blake sitting in the cockpit. Once again he calls out members of his crew and receives no answer. Embry wanders off beyond the plane. He walks into a nearby area populated with shrubs and hears a clanking sound. A few feet away lies a cross sticking out of the ground with a helmet lying on top.

The cross is a grave market for Klein, and it reads that he was killed in the plane crash on April 5, 1943. Overhead two pairs of jet aircraft fly by at a high rate of speed. Embry wonders why jet aircrafts are flying overhead when they haven't been invented yet, then he wonders how he knows the word jet. Despite it supposedly being 1943, Embry knows all about various types of jet aircrafts. Confused, he runs back to the plane and starts talking to crew members that are not there. He tries to talk the plane off of the ground, which obviously does not work. Neither does trying to start the propellers with his hands. Just then, Embry starts to laugh at himself as he claims that the plane is nothing more than an illusion. He continues to believe that he's either unconscious or out of his mind in some mental hospital. Embry continues to ramble on until he sees a vision of his crew off in the distance, including Kline. He starts to walk toward the crew, but once he gets close to them they disappear.

After talking to God for a moment, he collapses to the ground and starts clawing at the sand. The scene switches to a hospital room as now Embry is clawing at his bedsheets. There is a doctor and a psychiatrist standing beside the bed. The doctor says that Embry walked by a newsstand, looked at a headline, and then went into shock. The headline in question reads "World War II Bomber Found Intact in Desert." Apparently, back in 1943 the King Nine did crash into the desert somewhere in Africa. Embry, however, was not on the plane as he took ill before the trip and was replaced by somebody else. For the past seventeen years he's been carrying around the guilt of that mission. When Embry wakens, he tells the psychiatrist about his dream. He also mentions the part about the jet aircrafts, claiming that it was almost as if he'd gone back there today. The psychiatrist assures Embry that he only went back in his mind, but in the hallway Embry's nurse drops one of his shoes. The shoe is filled with sand...

Enigma buried in the sand, a question mark with broken wings that lies in silent grace as a marker in a desert shrine. Odd how the real consorts with the shadows, how the present fuses with the past. How does it happen? The question is on file in the silent desert. And the answer? The answer is waiting for us in the Twilight Zone.



Directed by Buzz Kulik
Written by Rod Serling
Produced by Buck Houghton
Created by Rod Serling

Bob Cummings - Captain James Embry
Gene Lyons - The Psychiatrist
Paul Lambert - The Doctor
Jenna McMahon - The Nurse

http://www.thetzsite.com/pages/episodes/037.html

[Valin]

photos at
http://www.thetzsite.com/pages/pictures/037.html