The North of Africa holds the world’s largest hot desert, known as The Greatest Desert, or more commonly by the Arabic word Sahara.  The Lady be Good’s WW2 mission hadn’t gone well and crew of the were hopelessly lost and running out of fuel when the first engine failed. They decided to abandon the aircraft rather than risk a crash landing and they parachuted out over, what they believed to be, the sea… only to discover it was a sea of sand.

The Lady Be Good as it appeared when discovered from the air.

The aircraft was in surprisingly good shape, considering it landed itself.

The aircraft’s weapons were still functioning.

Some of the guns were still able to be fired.

My apologies to the sharp eared amongst you as I misspoke when describing Lt Hatton’s take off, “Pushing up the throttles of his two Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp supercharged radials…”  The Liberator is, of course, a four engined aircraft.

Images used under a Creative Commons licence with thanks to the US Air Force.