Tom Landry, former coach of the Dallas Cowboys and Texan, describing how his B-17 ran out of gas at the end of World War II, forcing a crash landing. Great story! “We tore up one ’17 pretty good when we ran out of gas. Our alternative airfield was in France because at the time we didn’t have enough gas left in the tank to make it across the Channel to England. So we went to our alternate, and when we got there it was zero visibility—just totally fogged in. I don’t know how many hundreds of planes might have gone down that day trying to find their alternate field. We were skimming the treetops and the roofs of the houses, trying to find an airfield. We’d know about where it was from our navigator; he’d tell us where it was, and then we’d have to drop down through the fog to find the field. Well, finally we just ran out of gas. We moved everybody to the back of the plane, cut the motors, and looked for a field to land in. But fields over there are lined with trees, not fences. We overshot the field we picked and went right into the trees. The trees knocked the wings off, and when the plane stopped, there was a tree trunk sitting about a foot in front of us where we sat as pilots. Everybody just got up and walked off the plane. Nobody got hurt because there was no gas to explode.” ------ Tom Landry in a 1981 interview with Mark Oristano
