The morning of March 31, 1945, began like any other bomber mission for the crew of Miss Fortune, a B-17G Flying Fortress belonging to the 1st Bomb Division, Seventh Air Force. The target was Japanese shipping near Okinawa. Second Lieutenant John C. McKnelly, at just eighteen years old, was piloting his twenty-third combat mission. He had already survived two previous aircraft losses -- the first to anti-aircraft fire over Truk, the second to engine failure over the Philippines. He had walked away from both.
As Miss Fortune banked over the target area near Okinawa, a Japanese Mitsubishi A6M Zero -- piloted by a volunteer from the Shinpu (Divine Wind) Corps -- descended from the clouds at nearly 400 miles per hour. The Zero struck the B-17 amidships on the right side, shearing away the entire tail assembly. The vertical stabilizer, horizontal stabilizers, and rudder -- everything aft of the radio room -- were simply gone.
The aircraft entered an uncontrollable spin. McKnelly was slammed against the controls. The flight engineer was thrown against the ceiling and suffered a broken arm. The B-17 should have cartwheeled into the sea. It did not.
What saved them was a phenomenon that aviation engineers had long theorized about but rarely witnessed: a tailless aircraft can be stabilized if the center of gravity is managed correctly and the pilot applies precisely the right amount of elevator and aileron deflection to counteract the asymmetric drag. McKnelly had perhaps thirty seconds to figure this out.
He did.
By feeding the bomber into a shallow dive and applying constant backward pressure on the control column while managing the ailerons in minute corrections, McKnelly stabilized the aircraft into a gliding descent. He had no tail to work with -- no rudder to counteract torque, no trim tabs to hold a heading. He was flying the aircraft with pure instinct, feeling his way through every oscillation.
The engines, remarkably, were still running. McKnelly nursed the B-17 away from the Japanese coastline, burning off altitude in a long spiral. The crew, shaken but functional, prepared for a water landing. At 500 feet, McKnelly cut the engines to prevent fire on impact.
Miss Fortune hit the water in a relatively controlled belly-flop about twelve miles from the Okinawa coast. The crew inflated the life rafts and clung to the wreckage. McKnelly was the last to leave the aircraft. He had kept his B-17 in the air for eleven minutes without a tail.
A Navy destroyer, USS Borie, recovered the crew the following morning. McKnelly was promoted to First Lieutenant on the spot by the destroyer captain, who called it "the most extraordinary piece of airmanship I have ever witnessed."
John C. McKnelly went on to a thirty-year career in the United States Air Force, retiring as a colonel. He died in 2012 in Tucson, Arizona. His logbook from the March 31 mission is preserved at the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base. In it, in his cramped handwriting, the last entry for that mission reads: "Nose cold. Tail gone. Don't know how. Alive."