The North of Africa holds the world’s largest hot desert, known as The Greatest Desert, or more commonly by the Arabic word Sahara. The Lady be Good’s WW2 mission hadn’t gone well and crew of the were hopelessly lost and running out of fuel when the first engine failed. They decided to abandon the aircraft rather than risk a crash landing and they parachuted out over, what they believed to be, the sea… only to discover it was a sea of sand.
My apologies to the sharp eared amongst you as I misspoke when describing Lt Hatton’s take off, “Pushing up the throttles of his two Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp supercharged radials…” The Liberator is, of course, a four engined aircraft.
Images used under a Creative Commons licence with thanks to the US Air Force.