[ARC5] ARC-5/SCR-274 Navigation Receivers?

[Mike Morrow]

> Remember the B-24 returning to his base in, I think, Libya, after 
> bombing the continent?  Was homing (DF I guess) on his station, but flew 
> over it without realizing that and  ran out of fuel some hundreds of 
> miles into the desert where he crash-landed.

That was the "Lady Be Good", a B-24D.  It and the crew were on their
very first combat mission, to Naples on 4 April 1943.  They turned back
without dropping bombs and wound up over-flying their return destination
by two hours and 400 miles, all the time thinking that they were still
over the Mediterranean.  The crew eventually bailed out, so their bodies
were quite some distance away from where the aircraft self-landed in the
desert.  The crash was sighted in November, 1958, and first visited in
February 1959, all by British oil exploration people.  The navigator's
plotting instruments were found stored, so it appears that very little
or no course plotting was being performed for the trip by navigator DP Hays.

Its one of those sad things in which poor crew performance got the crew
killed and their aircraft wasted while accomplishing absolutely nothing
positive toward the war effort.

Mike / KK5F