The year is 1957. An RAF pilot is heading home from Germany for Christmas. Fog sets in and all radio communication is lost.

This story has been broadcast almost every Christmas since 1979 in Canada and across the world. My dad and I used to listen to it religiously. 

'Hope you'll enjoy! 

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-the-shepherd-edition-2017-1.4455219/fireside-al-maitland-reads-frederick-forsyth-s-the-shepherd-1.4458378

Great story!

Yup, it's a classic, written as a Christmas gift to his wife apparently. She had asked the author (Frederick Forsyth) to write her a ghost story, and he wanted to write one which was a bit different from the usual spooky house and clanking chains types of tales, so he drew upon his own experiences from when he was in the RAF himself and came up with this tale, although it might possibly have some apocryphal inspiration from tales put around in service folklore.

On a sort of related theme of being in dire circumstances in an early British jet fighter, a good friend of mine who was a Spitfire pilot in WW2, was flying a Gloster Meteor not too long after WW2 had ended, when he found himself in trouble. Unaware that there was a very strong wind blowing toward the south, he was on a flight over what he thought was the UK, but when he dropped down through the overcast to land since he was running low on fuel, he found himself over France, approximately 200 miles away from where he expected to be! Unable to spot an airfield in France, he crossed his fingers and turned toward England, hoping he would make it.

At the time there were some Meteors fitted with ejector seats, and some with just a conventional seat and parachute. Of concern was that a week or two before this incident, a pilot had tried to bail out of a Meteor without an ejector seat from being in similar circumstances, but unfortunately he had become tangled on the tailplane and perished when the Meteor crashed. So my friend had been gingerly flying along, anxiously looking at the fuel gauge and trying to figure out where he would put his hands and legs etc, in order clamber out of the thing so as to avoid striking the tailplane in order to safely bail out, since he too was flying one of the Meteors without an ejector seat. However, as he approached the Channel coast with the throttle back as far as he dared, he spotted the location of one of the grass emergency landing strips which were dotted along the English coast as remnants of the recently-ended WW2. These small strips were specifically for returning aeroplanes which were low on fuel or with battle damage and most dated from 1940 when they were used in the Battle of Britain. Naturally, the field was no longer operational and the grass was very overgrown, but  even when it had been well maintained, it was intended for things such as Spitfires and Hurricanes, rather than the jet-powered Meteor, but since it was the only even remotely suitable field in range, he decided to try to land on it. This he managed to do, so he  shut down the aeroplane and set off to find a telephone. A while later, when the aeroplane was recovered, he learned that it had precisely three gallons of fuel left in it!

The Meteor was undamaged, but since the field was very rough and not large, the jet could not be topped up and flown out of the field, so the aeroplane had to be drained of fuel (which is how he found out that it only had three gallons left in it), then dismantled and put on a truck to be driven to a suitable airfield to be put back together, which it subsequently was.