Ghost Stories?

There Was A story In WWII abought a bomber that returned to its base landed and taxied off the runway buy the engines running out of fuel . and when the ground crew boarded the plain The found that the crew had all died from gunfire hours before. are there any compareable storeis from the great War? True or just Great BS?
PS If Al Lowe cant dig one up i'll be Disapointed < ok Al thats a chalenge

Funny you bring this up. I have read at least two accounts on R.E.8's landing by themselves and ground troops finding the pilots and observers dead in the cockpits. Apparently, if indeed such occurences are genuine (I doubt it), the "Harry Tate" had the ability to land itself - by chance, if the crew couldn't. I'm a pretty skeptical guy but this is what I've read.

[Darryl]

Hi guys,
There are several recorded instances of RE 8's landing themselves, and some arguement that MvR's tripe almost managed to do the same.

Whilst I am sceptical, remember in the case of the Harry Tate, the inherent stability of the aircraft (one of the few WW1 a/c with it) made it hard to take violent evasive action, this would also help in a "dead stick" (sorry about the pun) landing.
There are instances in WW2 of trimmed aircraft, with the pilot dead, doing a series of dives and climbs (due to changes in speed) around the trimmed attitude.
If one of these cycles by fluke ended at ground level a "landing" of sorts would result.

Regards

Darryl

Boelcke with MvR beside him attacked an RE8 , he kept his speed so he flew 15 yards away form the machine and looked the plane over. He realised the occupants were dead and ecorted the flying derelict to enemy lines. Boelcke swore it came out of a cloud bank like that. Noone from Jasta 2 was credited with it. Apperantly there is no British report of that RE8 that day.

Another occasion occured on December 17th 1916 when the Australian pilot and observer Lt Sandy and Sgt Hughes on an artillery spotting mission. The RE8 had a wireless which they were using to communicate with a battery of Australian 8 pounders.

Sandy and Hughes were attacked by 6 albatros scouts , they succeeded in shooting down one planeand the fight was witnessed by two other australian pilots , EJ Jones and F Hodgson wo flew into the melee and drove off the attackers.

Hodgson and Jones saw the RE8emerge from the flight apparently unscathed , with its motor humming away happily and it cruised away without a single dip of the wings to the planes that saved it.However form that minute the radio was silent , the battery didnt recieve another signal.

One hour later a hospital at St Pol , fifty miles SW of the combat , reported an RE8 made a safe landingin a field beside an aerodrome but Hughes and Sandy were found dead. An immeadiate post mortem discovered they had been dead for an hour.A bullet had passed through the observers left lung and then hit the pilots skull , smashing it. The gas tanks were intact and empty , the throttle was wide open so it had glided in.The plane landed without damaging itself or its occupants.

The wind that day had been blowing from the north east so it was thought the plane had flown itself in wide circles to the left due to the engines torque and during this circualr flight had been blown 50 miles across the front to St Pol until it ran out of fuel and landed.

cam

I,too have heard the stories about the 'Harry Tates'in WWI,especially the story about Boelcke.Say what you want about the aircraft being stable,reflex action making the pilots come home,etc.,I believe in the hereafter theory!!In fact,there is a story in WWII about a USAAF Liberator which took off from Wheelus Air Force Base in Libya.It was caught in a sandstorm while returning.It overflew the base and was never heard from again.Apparently,the aircraft(???)has since overflown the base on every anniversary of its disappearance!!Then again,there abound stories of ghost WWI German soldiers in East Africa,ghosts in the battlefields of France and Flanders,at Marston Moor,the Tower of London......the list goes on and on.The tales are simply too detailed and consistent to be a figment of someone's imagination!Excuse me,got to go and see what's happening outside...just heard a voice calling"Contact"!!!

BTW,the Liberator was called 'Tagalong McManus',because it always lagged behind!Cheers.(Silly of me to have got scared back there.There was nothing there...just a smell of burnt castor oil!)

I think there's some confusion here. I've come across the Boelcke ghost story myself, but the aircraft is not an RE-8, it's a BE-2. It was the BE-2 that was designed to be inherently stable, and early models of the RE-8 (it would have to have been an early model to even be eligible to fit the time lines of these stories) suffered from serious lateral stability problems, especially in landing.

So do a global search-and-replace in your ghost-story memory banks and substitute BE-2c for RE-8 in the above tales.

[Reinout]

I have one from the Great War that didn't have anything to do with aviation. But it is still a cool story.

On the night of 31st of May and the 1st of June, there was the largest sea battle of the Great War, known as the Battle of Jutland. In the darkest hours of the night, Scheer had escaped the British once again. The British had thought the Germans long gone and transmitted their recognition code. The Germans were however within a few miles and picked up the signal. Armed with the code the Germans set about disrupting the enemy fleet. One of the larger ships (going from memory it may have been the "Thuringen") sailed without lights (as did all German vessels) and was spotted by the British cruiser "Black Prince". The British cruiser asked the vessel for identification, which it duly received. They then sailed towards the large ship, figuring it a British battleship. When within no more than a few hundred yards, the lights of the German ship went on, directed at the Britons who were blinded by the sudden burst of light. The guns had already been trained on the cruiser and within one or two minutes of constant fire by the Germans, the "Black Prince" was out of commission. Every man was dead, yet it sailed along for a while until it sank in the cold Northsea waters. It has been said that on dark nights a warship is sometimes seen. It is always without lights and crew and is supposed to be the "Black prince". Perhaps their spirits cannot find their peace because of the fast manner of death...

Anyway it is supposed to have been spotted by fishermen since that night.

Kind regards,

Reinout

You guys stop it. You're scaring me.

[mike_baram]

Mukund,
I seem to remember seeing a TV show long ago on that B-24...it seems that they found the wreckage in the Lybian desert. The best theory is that the crew lost their bearings over the ocean, and when they realized that they had already passed the coast, they decided to ditch, assuming that they were only a day or so away from the sea (actually it was something like 250-300 miles).
No bodies were found by the plane, so it appears that they started to walk northward until they died in the desert.
Mike