Commentary, Opinion

Perseverance

July 30, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By Brian Lockhart

There are people who like to fly under the radar and not really accomplish a whole lot in life.

Others take a different approach and strive for something bigger, stronger, faster, and more exciting.

Perseverance is a key factor in most of the great discoveries, inventions, and expansion of knowledge and the earth itself.

If the early explorers had not persevered through hardship and dangerous situations, the New World would have remained undiscovered, Marco Polo would not have made the connection to the East, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would have never set foot on the moon.

In February of 1958, a British oil survey crew was flying over an uncharted area of the Sahara Desert and spotted a military aircraft in the middle of the desert – hundreds of miles from the nearest airbase. It had American military emblems on its wings.

They reported their sighting to authorities.

In May of 1959, a recovery team made a trip to the site.

They found the aircraft in remarkably good shape considering it had been baking in the desert sun for 15 years.  The aircraft’s radio still worked, and so did its machine guns.

No human remains were found.

The aircraft was identified as a missing plane from the Second World War.

The craft was a B-24D Liberator bomber named Lady Be Good.

Records showed that Lady Be Good disappeared during a nighttime bombing mission on Naples, Italy.

When the aircraft failed to return to its North African air base, it was assumed the plane had crashed into the Mediterranean Sea and the crew was later listed as killed in action.

It was a mystery as to how this aircraft wound up in the middle of the desert, fairly intact with no crew on board.

A subsequent investigation, including a journal written by one of the crew explained what happened.

Lady Be Good left its airbase in Libya on April 4, 1943, for what would be her first and last mission, with nine crew members.

An airbase in the desert provided a lot of problems for air crews – most notably sand that interfered with the engines.

Lady Be Good never completed its bombing mission. After developing engine problems, the crew aborted the mission, turned the bomber around and jettisoned their bombs over the sea.

They were in total darkness over water and desert with no visible lights below. The last transmission from Lady Be Good was a report that their automatic direction finder was no longer working.

The crew was lost.

When it was apparent the craft was about to run out of fuel, the commander ordered everyone to bail out. Thinking they were still over water, the crew was surprised to find themselves landing on sand.

They managed to group together by using pistol shots and signal flares.

Of the nine crew, eight survived. One man died because his parachute failed to open.

The crew had no idea of their actual position – they were 400 miles inland.

They made the decision to start walking north, in the direction of their airfield.

Ironically, if they had decided to walk south, there was a reasonable chance they may have found their aircraft which landed on its own 16 miles south. The aircraft still contained provisions and they could have used the radio to call for help.

The crew was in a desperate situation. They were in the middle of the desert in scorching heat with little water.

They persevered.

The eight men started walking. They walked for almost 80 miles in desert conditions for eight days.

The one crewman wrote it all down in his journal which was located with his body.

By the eighth day, most of the men were done. Five of the eight were found grouped together where they died.

The other three men persevered. They found the body of the sixth man, 20 miles further north.

They then discovered the seventh man still another 27 miles north.

At the time, they could not locate the body of the eighth man.

However, a couple of years later, another survey group stumbled upon a mummified body, well over 100 miles north of the main group’s location. At the time, they surmised the body was that of a Bedouin sheep herder who had gotten lost.

They buried the body in an unmarked grave in the sand.

After this was reported, some investigators believe this was actually the body of the eighth man who incredibly, managed to walk 150 miles in the desert before succumbing.

Imagine being that man. All he could see was sky and sand, his companions were all dead, he knew his fate was sealed, and yet he kept walking.

He failed, but that was perseverance. 

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