Two B-17s collided mid-air, but instead of exploding, they fused together and kept flying as one

On December 31, 1944, as the world prepared to ring in a new year, the sky over the North Sea became a graveyard of twisted metal. At 11:47 a.m., Captain Glenn Rojohn felt a violent shudder that nearly threw him through the cockpit window. He looked down and saw a sight that defied the laws of physics: another B-17, piloted by Lieutenant William McNab, had risen directly into his aircraft.

Instead of an explosion and a plummet, the two bombers performed a grotesque mid-air dance. The propellers and top turret of McNab’s plane punched through the belly of Rojohn’s Little Skipper, locking them together like two mating dragonflies. For the next 23 minutes, Rojohn and his co-pilot, William Leak, would attempt the impossible—flying 60,000 pounds of conjoined wreckage to save their crews.

PART I: THE MONSTER WITH EIGHT ENGINES

The mission had been a nightmare from the start. One hundred B-17s attacking Hamburg were swarmed by 50 German Messerschmitts and a wall of heavy flak. Formation spacing was a guessing game through the black smoke. When McNab’s Nine Lives surged upward, the impact was catastrophic.

Rojohn looked through the shattered floor of his cockpit. Inches below his feet, he could see McNab’s pilots trapped in their seats. The propellers from the lower plane were chewing through Rojohn’s fuselage. Hydraulic fluid—the lifeblood of a bomber’s controls—sprayed like a severed artery.

Rojohn grabbed the control column. It was dead weight. The conjoined aircraft wanted to roll into a terminal spin. His co-pilot, Leak, braced his feet against the instrument panel and pulled with every ounce of strength. “She wants to dive, Glenn!” Leak shouted over the screaming wind.

The math was brutal. They were essentially a single aircraft with the drag of two, the weight of two, and controls that were half-severed.

PART II: THE CHOICE TO STAY

At 18,000 feet, altitude loss was accelerating—300 feet per minute. Rojohn realized the Little Skipper was a furnace; fire from the lower bomber was licking across his left wing route. He keyed the intercom and gave the hardest order of his life: “Bail out. Now!”

Six men from Rojohn’s crew scrambled to the waist door and jumped into the freezing German sky. They would spend the rest of the war as POWs, but they would live.

Then, Rojohn turned to his co-pilot. “Go, Bill. That’s an order.”

Leak didn’t move. He just looked at Rojohn and shook his head. He knew the physics. If one man let go of the yoke, the back pressure would fail, the nose would drop, and the centrifugal force of the spin would pin the remaining pilot to his seat, making escape impossible. “We ride it down together,” Leak replied.

PART III: THE REVERSE PHYSICS OF SURVIVAL

At 15,000 feet, Rojohn did something that violated every page of the flight manual. He reached forward and cut the engines on his own plane.

The propellers windmilled to a stop. Suddenly, the “Piggyback Monster” was flying on the power of the bottom bomber alone. By silencing the top engines, Rojohn reduced the heat feeding the wing fire and lowered the fuel consumption. The rate of descent slowed.

As they descended toward the farmland east of Wilhelmshaven, German civilians looked up in terror. Reports later circulated of an Allied “secret weapon”—a massive, double-bodied bomber trailing black smoke.

Rojohn scanned the winter landscape. He needed 1,500 feet of clear ground to land one bomber. To land two, he needed a miracle.

PART IV: THE SEVEN-SECOND CRASH

At 3,000 feet, the engines on the lower bomber began to misfeed. Fuel starvation. The aircraft yawed violently. Rojohn used differential thrust—revving one engine while idling another—to steer.

“Trees!” Leak yelled. A dense pine forest rushed toward them at 90 mph. Rojohn and Leak pulled back on the yoke until their muscles burned with lactic acid. The tail of the lower aircraft cleared the treetops by less than three feet.

Then, the ground hit.

McNab’s Nine Lives struck the frozen earth first at 87 knots. The fuel tanks in its wings ruptured instantly. A massive fireball engulfed the lower plane, killing McNab and the three men still aboard.

The force of that explosion acted like a catapult. It blew Rojohn’s Little Skipper upward and forward, snapping the metal teeth that had locked them together. Rojohn’s plane sailed through the air for two more seconds, 15 feet above the ground, before slamming down nose-first.

The nose cone shattered. The right engines tore loose and tumbled across the field. The left wing struck a wooden barn, shearing off at the root. The fuselage slid 100 feet through the snow and dirt before grinding to a halt in a cloud of dust.

PART V: THE SILENT SURVIVORS

Silence. Absolute, terrifying silence.

Rojohn and Leak sat in their seats, still gripping the controls. They looked at each other. Neither had a scratch. The heavily reinforced nose structure of the B-17—built to protect the bombardier—had absorbed a 15-G impact and saved the pilots.

Rojohn tried to release the yoke, but his fingers wouldn’t straighten. They were locked in a permanent claw shape from 23 minutes of gripping the controls for dear life.

German soldiers surrounded the wreckage within 90 seconds. They approached with rifles raised, but stopped in their tracks. They were looking at the debris of two distinct aircraft that had somehow arrived as one.

EPILOGUE: THE LEGACY OF THE SKIPPER

Glenn Rojohn and William Leak spent the next five months in Stalag Luft until they were liberated by British tanks in May 1945.

Both men were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. But the war had taken its toll. Rojohn, who once dreamed of being a commercial pilot, never flew again. He returned to Pennsylvania, joined his father’s air conditioning business, and raised four children. He kept the medal in a dresser drawer and rarely spoke of the day he flew a “Frankenstein” plane.

It wasn’t until a reunion in 1987 that Rojohn and Leak saw each other again. Across a hotel conference room, two gray-haired men who had shared 23 minutes of hell locked eyes and shook hands. Leak died the following year. Rojohn passed away in 2003, his story finally immortalized by his daughter in the book The Piggyback Flight.

The “Little Skipper” remains a testament to a simple truth: in the sky, when the impossible happens, the only thing that matters is the man sitting next to you.

Note: Some content was generated using AI tools (ChatGPT) and edited by the author for creativity and suitability for historical illustration purposes.