Or even a new contender from the last few weeks as a strangely callow, strangely careworn, England team find themselves still menaced by the cricketing equivalent of the dead man in Yossarian's tent: the airman who turned up one day, was immediately shot down, and three years on still lingers about the place.
Stalag 17, set in a Luftwaffe-run prison camp, starred William Holden as cynical, enterprising US airman Sefton.
Not only was he lucky but on many occasions his pilot was Paul Tibbets, an outstandingly skilful airman who was to command the Enola Gay.Mission 13In 1944 Paul Tibbets was told about the Manhattan Project and ordered to pick a crew for what was called special bombing mission number 13.
That was his failure, the year before, to give cover to his squadron leader, René Mouchotte, in an engagement in which the revered French airman had been shot down and then drowned.On June 11th 1944, four years after the fall of France, Mr Clostermann was one of the first French pilots to land in a cloud of dust on French soil.
More rains are expected.In Taiwan a military court cleared an airman of raping and murdering a young girl— 14 years after he was executed.
The most memorable previous incident the shooting down and capture of an American airman, Gary Powers, in the cold-war days of 1960 was different because his spy-plane was clearly flying in Soviet airspace.
Yet Japanese public sentiment has this week been inflamed by the United States' slowness in handing over an American airman suspected of yet another rape in Okinawa, where it has a military base.
Russia claimed that it had its own plan to husband the caviare-producing fish and pull some species back from the brink of extinction.In and out of jailRelations between the United States and Japan were strained by a delay in handing over to the Japanese an American airman suspected of raping a Japanese woman in Chatan, Okinawa.
On November 9th the Pentagon said the remains of an American airman shot down over North Vietnam had been identified.America still describes Vietnam as "an authoritarian state" that abuses human rights.
Mr Conrad remembered assembling crates and chairs to resemble the aircraft in which Charles Lindbergh had made the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic, "then sit inside it for hours pretending to fly".He studied aeronautical engineering at Princeton and made a career as a navy airman.
Israel failed to strike a deal over Ron Arad, an airman captured in Lebanon in 1986.
