The Shepherd 2017

The Shepherd follows a De Havilland Vampire pilot as he traces a fragile homeward path from RAF Celle in northern Germany to RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk on Christmas Eve, 1957. An abrupt electrical failure cuts the flight short, leaving him stranded high above the North Sea with dwindling fuel, no compass, and no radio. In the fog, he begins to maneuver in small triangular patterns, hoping to catch the attention of an air traffic controller who might dispatch others to “shepherd” him toward the nearest safe haven, Merriam St. George.

As the pilot grinds through his dilemma, an unlikely guide appears—a World War II era De Havilland Mosquito fighter-bomber. The Mosquito’s pilot communicates through hand signals, issuing a sequence of commands to steer the Vampire through the murk. At one tense moment the Vampire pilot glimpses the nose of the Mosquito, marked with the letters JK, a quiet emblem of memory and history guiding the way. The two aircraft seem to move as one, the Mosquito signaling the oncoming runway and clearance to land even as fuel runs perilously low.

The landing comes as a miracle in the fog: the runway lights flicker on, and the Vampire touches down on a dry strip with the engine almost out of fuel. Expecting the usual emergency response to follow an emergency landing, the pilot instead encounters a lone flight lieutenant and a 70-year-old civilian mess steward who are on duty at RAF Minton—the place now used as a storage depot and long since not an active station. With stores clerks on Christmas leave, only these two men are present to greet him, and the lights for the runway had never been disconnected.

A late-night call to RAF Merriam St. George confirms another alarming truth: no local pilots were authorized to fly that foggy evening, so the air traffic control tower had not been staffed. He then reaches the meteorological squadron, only to be told they had scrapped the outdated Mosquitoes three months earlier. Faced with these inconsistencies, the pilot cliff-notes his own theory—perhaps someone had bought a Mosquito, flown on Christmas Eve, seen a plane in distress, and somehow led it to the storage depot—the closest airstrip available to reach safety.

The flight lieutenant points the pilot toward a room prepared by Joe, the on-site mess steward who has served RAF Minton for two decades. Joe lights a fireplace and offers food, staying to talk and revealing a deeply rooted wartime memory. He shows the pilot a framed photograph of a young flyer beside a Mosquito — a nose marked with JK. Joe explains that during the war, John Kavanaugh would refuel his Mosquito and venture out alone to search for crippled bombers, guiding them home whenever he could. The pilot, looking back and forth between the memory and the present, learns that Kavanaugh died on Christmas Eve, 1943, when his plane went down in the North Sea.

In the end, the story tethers a present-day peril to a century-spanning act of mercy, where past bravery and a legendary aircraft converge to shepherd a lone pilot safely home. The encounter leaves the pilot with a quiet sense of awe about how memory and fidelity to duty can illuminate even the darkest skies.