![]() With all of the evidence at hand, military officials were able to piece together the final moments of Lady Be Good and her crew. The remains of the ninth airman, Sgt. Vernon Moore, have never been found. ![]() Woravka had been the only crew member that did not meet up with the group after bailing out of the aircraft. After months of looking, “the search was abandoned when equipment began to deteriorate and fail and the probability of the airmen being completely covered by shifting sand made the dangers of further search impractical.”īritish Petroleum would make one more discovery in August 1960, finally locating the remains of Lt. The markers were presumably used by the crew to mark their trail. Though, military personnel did recover some of the crew’s equipment, such as parachutes, flight boots, and arrowhead markers. Despite looking in the area for months, the team was unable to locate any of the crew’s remains. Military completed extensive ground searches, in addition to ground-controlled air searches. The initial investigation by military officials of the Lady Be Good crash site began in May 1959 and ended in August 1959. Wheel tracks on the sand are of the geological team that discovered the wreck. Finally, after sixteen years, the story of Lady Be Good would be told.Īn external view of the abandoned B-24 which, according to investigators, bellied into the sand with three engines feathered and without fuel the fourth engine was still operable. ![]() This information prompted officials from Wheelus Air Force Base and the Army Quartermaster Mortuary in Frankfurt, Germany to investigate the crash site. The letter contained information from the plane’s maintenance inspection records, as well as crew names found on clothing and other equipment. According to the Army Quartermaster Foundation, after visiting the site, Bowerman wrote a letter to Lt. The initial inspection of the site was conducted by a D’Arcy surveyor, Gordon Bowerman, who happened to be a friend of Lieutenant Colonel Walter B. The team of geologists sighted the downed aircraft during subsequent surveys and in March 1959, D’Arcy Oil Company dispatched a ground team to investigate. At the time, Wheelus did not have any record of an American plane having been lost in the area, therefore, they did not react immediately to the call. They noted the location and contacted Wheelus Air Force Base. In November 1958, British geologists working for D’Arcy Oil Company (later merged with British Petroleum) were flying over the Libyan Desert when they spotted a crashed plane. However, unlike others to go missing, the story of Lady Be Good and her crew would eventually be pieced together. Her story was not necessarily unique, as she was just one of many aircraft and crew to go missing during the war. At the end of the search, it was reported that Lady Be Good and her crew had been lost over the Mediterranean Sea.īy the end of WWII, the loss of Lady Be Good remained a mystery. A search and rescue team was deployed but the ill-fated crew could not be located. The crew never received the help that they requested and consequently, Lady overshot Soluch. He stated that the aircraft’s automatic direction finder was no longer operating correctly and they needed guidance. ![]() Hatton, who had radioed Soluch airfield for assistance. The last contact with Lady Be Good came from Lt. It was on the solo trip back to Soluch that things went awry. She eventually turned around just prior to reaching the target in Naples. Lady, which had been one of the last planes to depart for the mission, never caught up with the formation. Despite everything, Lady Be Good and her crew valiantly carried on. Many of the aircraft ultimately aborted their mission to Naples, Italy, and returned to Soluch. Unfortunately, strong winds in the Sahara Desert resulted in sandstorms and poor visibility for the bombers. The plan had been for the aircraft to leave Soluch in waves, thus requiring those leaving last to catch up with the formation. During that fateful trip, Lady Be Good carried nine members of the 514 th Squadron, 376 th Bomb Group, 9 th Air Force. On April 4, 1943, a B-24D Liberator nicknamed Lady Be Good took off from Soluch, an airstrip located near Bengazi, Libya, for what would be her first and final mission.
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