"K For Kitty."

In the "Flying Officer X" series, an Australian pilot has come to "know, trust, and finally get fond of" his Stirling plane.

The plane and crew are nearly destroyed in a raid but land safely, only to have the plane literally fall apart; long afterwards, the pilot stands with "the attitude of a seaman who looks across empty water, for the last time, and sees his ship no longer there."

The title refers to the military's method of naming the planes by letter of the alphabet.

An article in the Australian Women's Weekly (Worth Reporting, Graves in Holland, August 28, 1948, p. 18) prints a letter from the mother of Flying Officer Geoff Heard, in which her son is identified as 'the pilot who figures prominently in the stories of Flying-Officer X. "No Trouble At All" and "K is for Kitty"'. The article further reports that Heard's parents met Bates several times while visiting England and Bates's autobiography confirms this (The World in Ripeness, pp. 377-380).

Published in:

• The News Chronicle (March 9, 1942)
• The Greatest People in the World and Other Stories (1942)
• Jerusalem Radio Forum (October 16, 1942)
• A section of the story, with alterations, was published under the title "The Risk" in Wings of War: An Air Force Anthology (London: B.T. Batsford, 1942)
• There's Something in the Air (1943)
• Something in the Air (1944)
• The Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (1952)
• The Complete Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (Bloomsbury ebook, 2018)