chaswilly… The Flight of the Phoenix was about a plane downed in the Sahara, but I don’t think it was a specific type of aircraft. At any rate, it was fiction, based on a pot-boilerish novel.
There was a real-life drama involving one of those B24s, named the Lady Be Good, which vanished after taking off from a Libyan air base for a bombing run over Italy. They disappeared, and no one knew where until 1959, when the bomber was discovered deep in the Libyan desert. All the crew had parachuted out and were saved, only to die trying to struggle back to civilization.
According to a diary one of the airmen kept, after the bombing run they somehow missed seeing the coast of Libya on their return. (It was night, and unless someone happened to see the line the surf made against the shore, it was easy to miss, because at night the sands of the Sahara look exactly like the waters of the Mediterranean.) They truly believed they were still over water, until the plane ran out of gas, and by then they were hopelessly far out into the desert. The men had no hope of getting back alive, but they gamely kept at it for several days before succumbing to lack of water. When the bomber was discovered, by accident more than fifteen years later, the story electrified the country and was the cover story in LIFE magazine. I was eight years old at the time.
Google “The Lady Be Good” for more information.
Jim
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on Nov-11-07
at 23:55:38 PST
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on Nov-11-07
at 22:23:13 PST
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on Nov-11-07
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