SIGNED: Final Flights – Dramatic Wartime Incidents Revealed By Aviation Archaeology By Ian McLachlan

Struggling around waist deep in the evil-smelling mire the recovery team were more than 40 years too late to be of any assistance to the young airman whose aircraft they were now pulling from the slough. All those years ago he was only one of many to fall, sadly missed by friends and family, a sad statistic swiftly forgotten in the turmoil of war and the struggle for survival. Now, however, the recovery crew were anxious to discover every last detail about the aircraft, its pilot and the dramatic combat that resulted in the abrupt epitaph ‘Killed in Action’. In rediscovering the recent past, in reconstructing events and wartime incidents from tangled and buried wreckage, eye-witness accounts and contemporary documentation, aviation archaeologists bring recognition to the individual flyers involved and shed new light on the air war between the British, American and other Allied air forces one hand and their Axis opponents on the on the other. Take, for example, the B-17 of the USAAF 8th Air Force which demonstrated the awesome potential of the top-secret ‘Aphrodite’ project, the sunken P-47 Thunderbolts which highlighted the skills and courage of the air-sea rescue pilots, or the little-known story of the battle against the V1 flying bombs fought by the flyers of the US Navy uncovered through the scientific investigation of a crashed aircraft and painstaking research