I didn't know that in WWII,when a Fighter Pilot was killed in action where both the body and battered plane were recovered, the Navy buried both the pilot and his battered plane at sea by tossing them both overboard.

I'm sitting here watching this VHS tape called"Wings over the Pacific" that just showed this.

Has anyone else here ever heard of this :confused:

I've seen footage of them pushing damaged planes overboard but I hadn't heard that they would put dead pilots in them.

I'd always thought that, for a burial at sea, the body was wrapped in a tarp, weighted down, draped with a flag, and then placed on a board and then tilted into the sea after a ceremony.

It's quite touching and honorable and, sailors being superstitious sorts, it's always been considered the worst kind of luck to have a dead body on shipboard, because then all the drowned sailors who ever died at sea would one night rise from the waves and come to get their dead comrades.

The only thing worse would be to see the Flying Dutchman.