Confident they have found Rendell's P-38 Lightning, the layout and condition of the wreckage is also providing clues as to how it crashed.

The debris that we're getting here suggests that the aircraft did enter the ground almost, uh, I would say at about a 70, 80 degree angle into the ground.

So you've got to imagine this iconic design, two engines, without a pilot, roaring from across the sky, running low on fuel, from the west.

It's come in almost vertical into our stony field, and this iconic design has been turned in a matter of seconds into this crumpled pile of metal that you can see.

And then there's a, a plate here.

Yes.

That was one of the, the star finds by the pupils.

Uh, I mean, they really were forensically going through the soil, and one of them said, "Oh, I've got a little plate with writing on it." And you can see there, uh, all the drawing information, the contract, the date, tells you the oil capacity, and then right at the bottom, Lockheed Aviation Corp.

Where do these parts belong to on the Lightning?

You've got little inlet exhaust valves from the engine.

broken bits of the cockpit that locks the cockpit latches down when you shut it and go flying and you can see the little serrated buttons here just for locking your cockpit closed.

We have some of the perspex still with the distinct wartime olive drab paint on it and some of the very fearsome nose armament was also recovered so we have two .50 caliber bullets There are four .50-caliber Browning machine guns on the front, plus a 20mm cannon.

And what happened to the pilots themselves?

Yes, so 2nd Lieutenant Milo Rondal from Iowa, he then goes to Tunisia and less than a month later he is shot down and he ends up being captured and then taken to Stalag Luft 3 and he was there for the rest of the war and he was there during the time when the Great Escape was taking place.

Is he still with us? No, sadly he passed away in 2006, but his daughter tells us that he was a great patriot, loved the P-38, and he did a lot of flying after the war as well, but a lot of time for the P-38.

And I said, what do you think he would think of what we and the pupils are doing here? And he said, like that generation, he would have laughed.

Yeah

... a cube about five or six foot.

Um, so you then have to take a, a, a step back and excavate around the sides and leave that crumpled bit in the, in the middle, and then work out what's the best way of lifting that.

And we will have on hand, um, all our storage boxes.

We will have, um, wet newspaper if there's any, uh, fabric, sort of like, uh, harnesses, flying helmets, anything like that, paperwork.

That all goes into bags, and that'll all go off to get, um, preserved.

We will also have, um, you know, various protocols in place for any small arms munition, um, 303, and there'll be a whole process then to, to ring either the police or the bomb squad at the, at the end of the day to say, "There's something here that you need to get rid of." Um, and we do that.

[laughs]