Air combat Italy April '44

[veltro]

Sorry, but I think that the bomber did much more flight distance before crashing (considering all the events occurred before that moment). If you take a map of Italy, you'll see that south of Milan there is a plain extending much more than 50 miles. If the plane had crashed in that territory, the crew would have been captured in a matter of minutes, every German in the area being able to see the bomber crash.

Unless we know the exact route followed by the plane (or, at least, the route planned for that mission for the B-17s of 483rd BG, a data that could be obtained searching for the unit's mission report of that day...), any further deduction is pure guesswork.

The crashing point is the necessary start of the research, IMHO.