Nose art is a decorative painting or design on the fuselage of a military aircraft, usually chalked up on the front fuselage, and is a form of aircraft graffiti.

While begun for practical reasons of identifying friendly units, the practice evolved to express the individuality often constrained by the uniformity of the military, to evoke memories of home and peacetime life, and as a kind of psychological protection against the stresses of war and the probability of death. The appeal, in part, came from nose art not being officially approved, even when the regulations against it were not enforced...
read more + lots of photos on:

http://www.thevintagenews.com/2015/04/29/50-images-of-amazing-nose-art-bet-you-havent-seen-some-of-these-before/


Crazy nose-art :)

Initially, the US military did not pay any attention towards the discovery, but later they sent a team of researchers to investigate and find the remains of the crew members. Research teams scoured the area surrounding the crash site. They followed a few trails; however, they were unsuccessful in finding any trace of the crew members’ remains. The mission was called off due to equipment failure and the harsh conditions in the desert; but, fortunately, the remains of one of the crew were found in the latter part of 1960. Almost 16 years after the disappearance of ‘Lady Be Good’, search teams had a breakthrough about the doomed plane. Connecting the dots between the crash site and one crew member’s remains, the team was able to piece together the circumstances that surrounded the mysterious disappearance of ‘Lady Be Good’.
On 4th April 1943, ‘Lady Be Good’ took to the skies for the first time with its nine crew members on a bombing mission on Naples. The conditions were not favourable from the beginning, and a severe sandstorm engulfed the plane soon after it took off from Benina airstrip in Libya. Lieutenant Hatton decided to carry on with his mission despite the bad weather, which turned out to be a fatal mistake for everyone on board. Almost zero visibility and thick clouds caused the plane to drift further away from its intended target. The crew tried to make radio contact with the base, but due to some miscommunication their request for a location was not addressed.

First and last mission, view from above

T/Sgt. Benedict “Benny” Borostowski, ball turret gunner of Capt. Oscar D. O’Neil’s B-17 Flying Fortress “Invasion 2nd” (serial 42-5070) of the 401st Bomb Sq, 91st BG.

The B-17 and crew were on a bombing run destined for the Focke-Wulf factory in Bremen on the 17th of April 1943 when it was hit by flak and crashed in the region of Nikolausdorf, near Oldenburg in Germany.

The crew spent the rest of the war as POWs.