Flying on Empty

Most fantastic sight I've ever seen. And we're at five hundred feet, we had to be because of the height of the cloud, doing our recce, and out to sea was a great band of black smoke and blinking lights in the black smoke, and of course those were the battleships firing at exactly where we were. And we never even, I never even thought about it, but the targets were right underneath us, and we were in effect flying through a hale of huge shells. But it never...I was too dumb, it didn't occur to me. But we went back and forth up and down the beach. We watched the landing craft, the first landing craft come in, the Queens Own, and all the Canadians come into their beach as we went back and forth. Absolutely staggering sight, so Jack Taylor, who became a chiropractor in Brockville, he's gone, Alzheimer got him. Handsome guy, just fantastic man. He was my leader, the two of us. And he...when you're flying number two, use a lot more petrol, gas because you have to keep up with the leader, so you use more fuel. So finally, I'm mesmerised by what I'm seeing and finally I look at my fuel gauges, the arrow is pointing at zero. So I shout at Jack Taylor "I've got to get back, I'm...it says zero." So off we went back toward England, and we, I pulled the throttle back and leaned back the fuel mixture as far as I could. Got up to maybe 1500, 2000 feet and off we started. I was prepared to bail out anytime, quite, without any problem because the ocean, the channel is loaded with ships. You do not ditch a Mustang. Because if you hit the water, the Mustang has a great scoop underneath, and it's so beautifully streamlined, if you try to ditch, as soon as you hit the water the scoop would take you straight down, and you'd go to the bottom of where you are and you're done. There's no way that you can, that you can land this air plane on the water and get away from it.