The Shepherd

These were what bomber crews called Mossie pilots in WW2 who flew the dangerous skies over the Channel and waited for Lancasters flying home with their radios shot to pieces, often with heavy casualties on board, often with shrapnel having shredded the airframe, the flight crew coaxing the engines on for just another half hour. They would come in through the East Anglia fog trying to make it home before being jumped by a predatory German Bf109. Sometimes they made it. Sometimes they went into the drink. Forsyth wrote a lovely novella about a RAF pilot whose instruments went dead halfway across the Channel.. and how he was rescued from certain death by one such Shepherd. And then today, I read about an RAF pilot who talked-down a civilian solo flier who suffered a stroke in middair and lost eyesight. It seems that shepherds still fly.