Lockheed P-38 Lightning F-5B

The F-5B followed the same reasoning that had produced the F-4 and the F-5A. The Lightning was fast, long-legged and climbed high, so with its armament removed it made a photographic platform that was hard to catch. The F-4 had been based on the P-38E and the F-5A, of which 181 were built, on the P-38G; the F-5B started from the P-38J, the fighter version with chin radiators and improved intercoolers that let the Allisons deliver more power. The English and Spanish Wikipedia articles both state that Lockheed modified 200 P-38J airframes in production into unarmed reconnaissance aircraft, and the production table in the German article credits all 200 to the Burbank plant. This Day in Aviation stresses that the work was done on the assembly line, whereas later variants were converted at Lockheed's modification centers.

The nose that had carried machine guns and a cannon now held the photographic equipment. The fit changed from mission to mission: the aircraft could take Fairchild K-17, K-18 or K-22 cameras, which produced 9 by 9 inch images and were mounted vertically or obliquely, each type being optimised for low, medium or high altitude. The Italian Wikipedia sums up the visual difference from the fighter in a single caption: the nose holds cameras, not guns. It remained a single-seater, so the pilot flew, navigated and photographed alone, usually deep over enemy territory and without escort.

The F-5B stands in the middle of a long line. Before it came the F-4, 99 of which were derived from the P-38E, the F-4A, 20 of them from the P-38F, and the F-5A from the P-38G; one F-5A was also turned into the XF-5D, an experimental two-seater with a glazed nose. After the F-5B, reconnaissance Lightnings no longer came straight off the line: according to the English Wikipedia, hundreds of P-38Js and P-38Ls were rebuilt at Lockheed's Dallas Modification Center as F-5Cs, F-5Es, F-5Fs and F-5Gs, while the Spanish article lists the last three as conversions made on the ground. Each of these versions has its own entry in the Lightning variant census.

The US Navy never bought fighter Lightnings, but it did fly four F-5Bs. The English and Spanish Wikipedias agree that these were land-based aircraft in North Africa, inherited from the Army Air Forces and redesignated FO-1; the English variant list also records them as XFO-1, the naval designation for four F-5Bs operated for evaluation. It was the only naval use of the P-38.

The best-known F-5B pilot was not an American. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of Night Flight, Wind, Sand and Stars and The Little Prince, left New York in April 1943 with a military convoy bound for Algiers, determined to fight again with the Free French air force. He was 43, eight years past the age limit for such pilots, and his exemption was finally approved by General Eisenhower. He joined his former unit, renamed Groupe de reconnaissance 2/33 Savoie, which flew Lightnings while attached to the US Army Air Forces' Third Photo Group; the English article on the aircraft calls it Groupe de Chasse II/33 instead. One officer described the machines as war-weary and barely airworthy, and the writer needed seven weeks of demanding training before his first sortie, because the Lightning was far more sophisticated than anything he had flown before.

Old crash injuries left him unable to put on his own flight suit or turn his head to the left to look for enemy fighters. On his second mission he wrecked a P-38 after an engine failure and was grounded for eight months, until General Ira Eaker personally intervened to reinstate him, on condition that he fly only five missions. Back in his single-seat F-5B he resumed his habit of reading and writing in the air: he would sometimes keep reading until just before take-off while mechanics warmed up the engines for him, and once, on return, he circled the field for an hour to finish a novel. His comrades found him intermittently depressed, and there was talk of taking him off flying status.

That day Saint-Exupéry took off from Borgo airfield on Corsica in F-5B-1-LO serial 42-68223 (Lockheed construction number 422-2734). It was his ninth reconnaissance sortie, despite the agreed limit of five. His task was to photograph the Rhone valley and German troop movements ahead of Operation Dragoon, the Allied landing in southern France on 15 August 1944; the French Wikipedia describes the route as Bastia to Chambéry. This Day in Aviation puts the departure at about 08:45, while the English article on the P-38 speaks of midday. He never came back and was never seen again, and the news spread first through the literary world and then into international headlines.

For more than half a century nothing was found. In September 1998 the trawler Horizon was working east of Riou Island, south of Marseille, when its second mate, Habib Benamor, found a silver identity bracelet among the fish in the net; the captain, Jean-Louis Bianco, cleaned it and read the name of Saint-Exupéry. It was also engraved with the names of his wife, Consuelo, and of his American publisher, Reynal & Hitchcock, and it was hooked to a scrap of fabric, presumably from his flight suit. Some doubted it was genuine because it had turned up far from his planned route.

In May 2000 a diver found Lightning debris off the coast of Marseille, close to the bracelet site and scattered over several thousand square metres of seabed. After a two-year delay imposed by the French government, the remains were raised in October 2003 between Marseille and Cassis. One small part was marked 2734 L, matching the Lockheed construction number of the writer's aircraft, and in April 2004 investigators working with the French underwater archaeology department confirmed that the wreck was Saint-Exupéry's F-5B. Only a small portion of the aircraft was recovered and no gunfire damage was found, which was not considered conclusive. In June 2004 the fragments, among them the left main landing gear, were handed to the Air and Space Museum at Le Bourget, Paris, where an exhibit commemorates his life.

What brought the aircraft down is still unknown. In 1948 former Luftwaffe wireless operator Hermann Korth published his logs, recording a P-38 shot down by a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 around noon on 31 July 1944, although the entry may describe the P-38 of Second Lieutenant Gene Meredith, lost south of Nice on 30 July. Reconnaissance pilot Robert Heichele later claimed the kill; the English article on the writer dates his account to 1972 in the magazine Der Landser, the article on the aircraft to 1981. He described flying an Fw 190 D-9, a variant not yet in service, and German military archives credit no victory to him or his unit in July or August 1944; he was himself shot down on 16 August 1944 and died five days later. In 2008 a journalist from La Provence obtained the testimony of Horst Rippert (1922-2013), brother of the singer Ivan Rebroff and an admirer of the airman's books, who said he had shot him down. No record supports the claim, and former comrades doubted a man who had kept quiet for 64 years. The sortie probably entered and left the coast near Cannes, yet the wreck lay south of Marseille. The German Wikipedia treats the shoot-down as fact; the other sources leave it as one hypothesis among many.

The F-5B was at the centre of another famous loss. On 12 April 1944 Adrian Warburton, the RAF's legendary reconnaissance ace, took off in an F-5B borrowed from the US Army Air Forces to photograph strategic targets in Germany. He never reached the rendezvous and was never seen again. His remains were recovered in Germany in 2003 from the wreck of a crashed USAAF F-5B Lightning.