12 thoughts on ““Two Hundred Miles From The Nearest Town””

  1. Read the comments, would seem there’s an “expert” claiming it’s a photoshop hoax, altho’ to what end remains a mystery.

  2. Think about that poor guy alone and dying. People that think mars is too harsh should realize the earth can kill you just as dead in most of it’s parts. Very few places on earth are Eden like. We survive because of infrastructure and other people. Infrastructure and other people would work on mars just as well.

    One day mars may have a thriving community where they laugh at analogies of Antarctica. Those analogizers fail to realize the millions of people already live in Anarctica… only they call it northern Canada or northern Russia.

    1. It’s a beautiful P-40, but I wouldn’t worry about the pilot. He was undoubtedly picked up by some Jawas in a sandcrawler which them came under attack from a Go’uld Alkesh out of Alexandria, which allowed him to flee across the desert to be picked up by a weird guy in a British police call box. Then his life really got weird.

      The article says that the locals regard the plane as a piece of junk. Now is the opportunity to offer them $100 US dollars for it, in cold hard cash. They’ll undoubtedly haggle, but just point to the bullet holes and bent propellor and talk them down.

      1. George, I was being serious… but I do like your mixing of SF themes.

        $100 is about the same as free. Transporting the thing is what will cost… hmm… was this an analogy about getting resources to LEO?

      2. It might as well be. It seems a vehicle can drive there without too much difficulty, but they’ll need to send in some battlefield recovery experts who work miltary crash sites, along with a truck with a boom arm to lift it and a couple trucks to haul it.

        Reconstructing what probably happened will be interesting, pouring over the missions his unit was flying and German positions on the ground, to try and figure out what he was thinking when he flew off into the deep desert. Was he disoriented? Is the compass still reading correctly? Are the radio or radio navigation aids damaged? Was he being pursued by Messerschmitt’s? Was he losing fuel while heading to an alternate airbase farther inland along his probable flight path?

          1. P-40s rarely flew high enough to need oxygen. Their engines didn’t have sufficient superchargers for high altitude operations. In the desert war, this wasn’t an issue.

            Oh, and several F-22s have been deployed to the UAE. Not surprisingly, the Iranians are not pleased.

        1. The article says he was ferrying a damaged plane to another base for repair. Why he got lost is a mystery that may never be solved. Looking at the pictures, it appears he did a belly landing because the prop was ripped off the plane. It’s interesting that the tail wheel is down (you can see what appear to be the gear doors open), meaning he must’ve tried to land with the wheels down but the mains didn’t deploy. That, or the tail wheel was down due to the previous damage. It’ll be interesting to see what military records may still exist about the plane’s damage before the flight.

  3. Ok, doesn anybody not see the irony of the term ‘Locals’ and 200 miles from the nearest town?

    1. In that desert, the definition of “locals” might be different from our own. It’s like in parts of Alaska where your nearest “neighbors” might be 40 miles away.

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