This thread encouraged me to revisit, for the first time in about thirty years, the story of the discovery of that other well known Sahara wreck, the Lady be Good and the subsequent search for the crew. If you need a feel for the sheer enormity and extreme difficulty of the task facing a team searching for a body in the desert, you can do little better than obtain a copy of After the Battle Number 25, which outlines the story of the search for the bodies of the crew of the B-24 in 1959.
Although they bailed out over the desert, the crew, minus a member killed when his parachute failed to open, all eventually joined up to start walking through the desert to safety.
Once the plane had been found, search assets included desert navigation and survival specialists, trucks, an SC-47, a Bird Dog and two Sioux helicopters (flown in by C-130) as well as an RF-101 Voodoo and RB-66 specifically tasked with photo recce for the search on two separate occasions. 5,500 square miles of desert were painstakingly searched by land and air over a period of three months without finding the crew – although evidence of waypoint markers placed by the crew were found..
The first group of bodies were found by chance by an oil exploration party the following year – more than 50 miles from the bail out point. The final body was subsequently found, again by chance, over 90 miles from the point where the crew joined up after the bale-out.
At every level, the numbers are absolutely astounding.
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