The Lost Pilots

by Corey Mead

  The White Squadron drove for seventy miles to the north, and then headed due east for another sixty-five miles. Lulled by the punishing heat and endless horizon, they might have been excused for failing to notice a tiny black rectangle that appeared in the far distance.

  But notice it they did, and Warrant Officer Titus Polidori became intrigued by what he could only identify as an “indeterminate carcass.” The platoon veered off to the right to go examine the mystery object. But even as they moved closer, the black rectangle remained hazy in the shimmery midday heat.

  As the platoon drew to within a mile of the object, Warrant Officer Polidori finally identified it as “the cabin of a small plane from an old model.” When he reached the wreck he saw that it was a single-engine biplane, warped and misshapen from the crash, the propeller blades shattered. The plane lay awkwardly upside down, its fabric casing rotted away. As Polidori scanned the ground beneath the wings, his eyes fastened in amazement on a single object: a human skull.

  Angling his head, Polidori saw that the long-dead pilot’s skeletal body lay twisted on its side, partially buried in the sand. Mummified by the decades, the areas of the pilot’s skin that lay uncovered in the dry Sahara air were crinkled like stiff, translucent paper; his right arm was crooked, the fingers frozen in a half-fist. A deep scar, no doubt the result of the plane crash, angled over his right eyebrow. Tattered but identifiable clothing hung in strips off his body. Even some of his hair could still be seen.

  On the biplane’s starboard wing, jutting diagonally above him, the pilot had tied his passport, wallet, and a large waterproof envelope that held his aircraft logbook, which he had turned into a diary. Though Polidori didn’t realize it at first, these belongings contained the answer to a mystery that had remained unsolved for twenty-nine years.

  A glance at the passport revealed the pilot’s identity: Captain William Newton Lancaster. Tucked into Lancaster’s wallet was a photo of a slim, grinning young woman in a bomber jacket, sporting a flying helmet and goggles on her head. “Now my water will give out today,” one of the final entries in Lancaster’s diary read. “It is then just a matter of a few hours and please God a quick end.”

  Warrant Officer Polidori quickly informed his superiors in Adrar of the platoon’s find. The White Squadron transported Lancaster’s remains to the hospital morgue at the French military base in Reggane, after which the bones were placed in a casket and buried in a palm grove a few hundred meters north of the nearest buildings. Because he was a former RAF officer, Lancaster was awarded full military honors.

  After his crash, as Lancaster lay wounded in the desert with little to do but ponder his fate, he had filled his diary with thoughts of Jessie and his family, taking full responsibility for the jagged path that had led him to his present situation. The crinkled pages made for brutally riveting reading. During the day the desert sand was so hot that, even in the shade, it nearly burned Lancaster’s bare skin. At night the temperatures dropped so precipitously that he had to throw on, he wrote, his “[v]est, shirt, sweater, coat, flying jacket, muffler of wool, trousers, flying trousers over them, socks and underpants,” although he still remained cold.

  In the early morning hours immediately following his crash, Lancaster’s first thought was of water: Had it run out? “No, thank God,” he wrote. “Two precious gallons of it. I can live for a few days. I am naturally feeling shaky but must keep my head at all costs. I hope the French will search for me, but it is going to be difficult to find me as I am away from the track. I thought of walking to the track and prepared to set out, but Chubbie’s and my talk about this came to my mind. No: I must stick to the ship.

  “I am going to ration my water. A week at most I suppose. I wonder where everyone thinks I am. I think mostly of my mother and Chubbie. I love them both. Chubbie is my own sweetheart, but mother is such a darling. They both were proud of me before I set out. Alas I have truly bitten the dust of disappointment.”

  By 11 a.m. that day, the desperate reality of Lancaster’s situation had taken hold. “The first day is passing like a year,” he wrote. “Find it difficult to fight against taking a drink but I must. My very life depends on strict rationing. Hope I don’t go blind—the blood is clotting around my eyes. Weird ideas one gets when minutes seem hours. Watching the vulture fly [above me] made me wish I could catch him and tame him and leap astride and fly to a pool of water. I would not mind how dirty it was. . . .

  “I can now quite realize this period of agony in the Sahara desert is going to be as long to the mind as my whole life-time. Truly am I atoning for any wrong done on this earth. I do not want to die. I want desperately to live. I have the love of a good mother and father and a sweetheart whom I adore. If anything happens to me Chubbie go back to your mother and think of some of the good things about me. There must be some because you have so often told me all you think of me.”

  At 6 a.m. the following morning Lancaster noted that he had passed a quiet night. “My flares were a success, at least they showed a brilliant light for 60 seconds,” he wrote, before scrawling with frustration, “I burnt one every fifteen minutes to half an hour. No one saw them!!!” He drew the obvious conclusion: “It is evident to me that I may be further off course than I anticipated otherwise the car would have seen me in the night. I certainly saw no lights at all. Oh! Please send out your aeroplanes now. I am not strong as I have had no real food since I left England.”

  Four hours later Lancaster wrote, “Have just tried to inspect extent of injuries. The main worry is the cut between the eyes and more over the left eye than the right. I am terribly afraid of blood poisoning settling in. I removed the bandage after some painful work of pulling it away from where it had stuck. Now what to do I don’t quite know, whether to cover up or leave to dry up. Lots of sand got into the cuts last night.”

  His thirst was a constant torment: “What a temptation it is to go to the water bottle. What absolute nectar does it contain. It is my only desire for the moment, water, water, water. Mother, what would you think if I were to dash into your bathroom while you were bathing and plunge my head into the water, clean or dirty, and drink and drink and drink?

  “Just saw a white butterfly and a dragon-fly (no, not dreaming, actually), this gives me hopes I am near an oasis. . . . Come on planes! It was strange, I was just as thirsty at night as during the day.”

  That night, overcome with exhaustion, Lancaster slept a great deal. “I must now conserve every bit of energy to keep alive for about three or four days in the hope that I will be rescued,” he wrote on Saturday, April 15. “If the planes start searching today I hope for relief. My water will hold three or four days longer—unless I go mad and consume it before. You see, my wounds have made it hard for me as I lost a lot of blood and they trouble me terribly in the day when the sun is up. Mind you I do not unduly complain of my plight. After all I brought it on myself and must call it the luck of the game and play it out to the end.”

  By this, his third day, Lancaster had learned the desert’s rhythms. “The hours from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. are the dreaded ones,” he wrote. “The heat of the sun is appalling. That I shall be ill after this even if found is inevitable. But I don’t mind as long as I can get water. That is my constant craving. WATER.”

  By the next day, Lancaster was losing hope. “Now I know I am to the right of my proper course, this fact makes me anxious as they may not suspect this,” he noted grimly. “The days when the sun comes up are indescribable. I just lie it seems for years on my back under the shelter of the wing thinking all sorts of mad thoughts. . . . I feel weak, so weak, in the body. It is shriveling up around my stomach and ribs.

  “Chubbie my sweetheart, and mother my best friend, and father my pal, do not grieve, I have only myself to blame for everything. That foolish, headstrong self of me.

  “Life after all is only just a very short span in the scheme of things. I wish I had done more good in my time that’s all.

  “Come to me Chubbie but take
care in the coming, believe me I shall never fly over a desert again. I suppose I can last two or three more days. Then it will be a few hours—madness—and death at last.”

  The next day’s hell was much the same: “Am suffering mental torment again. I am positive I saw that light last night and the person who fired it must have seen mine, yet nothing has come. . . . No machines in the sky etc. I wish I had not drunk that extra flask of water last night. I have cut my chance by a day. Things seem very bad to me. . . . Heat is going to be ghastly today. Am thinking of you mother and Chub.

  “Not a breath of air. I am resigned to the end if it has to be. . . . Oh for water, water.”

  Lancaster began his sixth day with a prayer, even as he acknowledged that the possibility of rescue was now “almost unbelievable.” As he braced himself for the day’s “five hours of hell,” the sense of suffocation was overwhelming. “Not a breath of air,” he wrote. “Flies bad today. After my poor cut head.”

  On the seventh day after his wreck Lancaster knew his time was almost up. Thinking it would be his final entry, he wrote advice to his loved ones: “Chubbie give up flying (you won’t make any money at it now). . . . Darling Mother whom I have neglected far too much in my life—I want you darling to see Chubbie and talk everything out with her. . . . To my Father—you and I just need a handshake in thought form. We understand. Mother, see little Pat and Nina Ann for me, kiss them for me and explain what is in my heart. See Kiki, tell her she can now really forget.” His state of mind was surprisingly philosophical given the circumstances. He noted with pride how long he had held out after his crash, and said that the accident itself was just luck of the draw. “No one to blame, the engine missed, I landed upside-down in the pitch-dark and there you are,” he opined. “Mother and Chub. If there is another world, if there be something hereafter (and I feel there is), I shall just be waiting.”

  Against his expectations, Lancaster woke to another morning, Thursday, April 20, 1933—one year exactly from the night of Clarke’s death. “So the beginning of the eighth day has dawned,” he wrote. “It is still cool. I have no water. I am waiting patiently. Come soon please. Fever wracked me last night. Hope you get my full log. Bill.”

  In all likelihood Lancaster died later same that day, parched in the Sahara’s agonizing heat.

  EPILOGUE THE PAST REACHES OUT

  On May 16, 1936, in Epsom, England, Jessie married Flight Lieutenant John Barnard Walter Pugh, a well-known British pilot, who one year earlier had been rescued from the English Channel after his plane was forced down by engine trouble. From that point on, Jessie was known as Mrs. Jessie Pugh. She and her husband had met in 1935, when Jessie worked for him as manager of the Commercial Air Hire Company’s office at Heston Aerodrome, just west of London. After they announced their engagement, Jessie told the press there would be “no more flying stunts for me. . . . My wild days are over. I’ve had my fun. I’m just going to sit back and let John do the piloting for both of us now.”

  Now, after lengthy stints in both Singapore and Spain—they had been living in the former when the Japanese invaded during World War II—the happy couple resided in a cozy apartment in Berkshire. They had been married for a quarter century when, on the morning of February 19, 1962, the phone rang in their downstairs hallway. When John Pugh answered, he was greeted by the voice of their next-door neighbor telling him that Jessie was in the newspaper.

  John walked out to the mailbox to get that morning’s Daily Express. As he settled back in the dining room to peruse it, Jessie heard him exclaim, “My god!” The startling discovery of the wreck of the Southern Cross Minor, along with Lancaster’s sun-bleached skeleton and the diary he had so assiduously kept during his ordeal in the Sahara, had just been reported. It was a “most appalling shock,” Jessie remembered later. “I didn’t know what to think. What can one think? It was the most colossal shock that anyone can imagine.”

  Though Jessie no longer wore the bomber jackets or flying helmets that she sported in her twenties, she retained the vigor and trim, dark looks of her youth, mixed with an air of contentment that stemmed from decades of agreeable partnership with her husband. Now, as she read the news of the French Camel Corps’ discovery, a wave of acute grief swept over her as she thought of Lancaster perishing in the desert. But in the weeks to come, as the media swarmed over the story, this pathos was replaced by apprehension, as Jessie worried that the diary might contain scandalous information about her past—a past she had worked for decades to put behind her.

  In April 1962 Jessie picked up the diary from her lawyer. She could scarcely believe what she held in her hands. Though she had been warned by French officials that the document was almost unbearably poignant, she was ill-prepared for the emotions that roiled her as she read through the pages. Her husband, seeing her turmoil, asked her what was wrong. Jessie had planned on putting forward a brave face, but she couldn’t help herself: she began reading the diary out loud. When she had finished, John Pugh declared that Lancaster’s story had to be told. “Anyone who has the guts to die like that deserves to be heard,” he said. Six months later, in October 1962, the Daily Express presented the whole of the diary’s contents, with an added foreword by Jessie.

  “I had never forgotten Bill Lancaster,” Jessie wrote in her foreword. “The world we had known together, the roaring ’twenties, the death-or-glory record flights in tiny biplanes, the Depression, when there wasn’t much in the way of picking for pilots like us, then drama, headlines, and Bill’s tragic exit from it all; it was half a lifetime away.

  “The passing years had taken the sharp edges off the memories. Sometimes it seemed like a different world. But it hadn’t been another world. The headlines that said his body had been found told me that. I have been happily married for 26 years. Then suddenly the past reaches out and takes hold of the present.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SOURCES

  I wish to express my deep appreciation and gratitude to Andrew Lancaster (Bill Lancaster’s great-nephew) and Noni Couell for their willingness to share their archive of materials on the Lancaster-Miller case, including items privately held by the family. Andrew’s moving 2014 documentary, The Lost Aviator: The True Story of Bill Lancaster, which Noni produced, is a finely wrought, highly personal piece of work, and essential viewing for anyone interested in the story of Bill Lancaster and Jessie Miller. Among the research items I credit to Andrew Lancaster/The Lost Aviator are:

  • “The Lancaster Case,” by James Carson, Bill Lancaster’s lawyer, a 118-page account of the trial in Miami, prepared privately for the Lancaster family in 1935.

  • Bill Lancaster’s diary, letters, and telegrams from his trip to Nogales on behalf of Latin-American Airways.

  • An extensive collection of media coverage, both local and international, of Bill Lancaster’s trial.

  • Lancaster’s and Jessie’s trial testimony.

  In addition to the above materials, Ralph Barker’s superbly written and researched Verdict on a Lost Flyer, published in 1969, was immensely valuable, as he was the sole individual to interview Jessie in detail about her life and her relationship with Lancaster. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Pen & Sword Aviation for permission to quote from the 2015 reprint of Barker’s book.

  The Australian scholar Chrystopher J. Spicer was also immeasurably helpful and generous with his time. I offer him my heartfelt thanks for his penetrating insights into the nature of Jessie and Lancaster’s relationship. Chrystopher’s 2017 biography, The Flying Adventures of Jessie Keith “Chubbie” Miller, is the definitive work on Jessie, and does a brilliant job of documenting and recovering the too-little known legacy of this pioneer aviatrix.

  Colin Dickerman and James Melia are the finest editors I’ve ever worked with, and I can’t thank them enough for their relentless enthusiasm and their brilliantly incisive feedback. They pushed me at every step to make this a fuller, more engaging work, and in so doing, they showed me, frankly, how to be a writer. I am deeply in their
debt. Hearty thanks, as well, to the rest of the stellar team at Flatiron, and to Georgina Morley, my editor at Macmillan UK.

  I am also profoundly grateful to my agent, Andrew Wylie, and to Kristina Moore, for so ably and professionally steering the ship.

  AS and WM.

  To Laura, Caleb, Mom, Dad, Ken, and the rest of my family: I love you.

  BOOKS

  Barker, Ralph. 1969. Verdict on a Lost Flyer. London: Harrap. (Reprinted in 2015 as Bill Lancaster—The Final Verdict: The Life and Death of an Aviation Pioneer. London: Pen & Sword Aviation.)

  Butler, Susan. 2009. East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart. Boston: Da Capo Press.

  Evans, Colin. 2002. A Question of Evidence: The Casebook of Great Forensic Controversies. Hoboken: Wiley.

  Gibson, Karen Bush. 2013. Women Aviators. Chicago: Chicago Review Press.

  Grant, R. G. 2007. Flight: The Complete History. London: DK Publishing.

  Jennings, Peter, and Todd Brewster. 1998. The Century. New York: Doubleday.

  Jessen, Gene Nora. 2002. The Powder Puff Derby of 1929: The True Story of the First Women’s Cross-Country Air Race. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks.

  Kessner, Thomas. 2010. The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Lebow, Eileen. 2002. Before Amelia: Women Pilots in the Early Days of Aviation. Washington, DC: Brassey’s.

  Levell, Mary. 2009. The Sound of Wings: The Life of Amelia Earhart. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.