As someone who is currently 'stepping' very carefully' through the minefield of Copyright, Crown and otherwise, which means a number of projects are stalled (and two have had to be abandoned as fees to high to keep the resulting PDF free and not good enough for me to charge for it), plus having had my Intellectual Property stolen (Software, Articles as well as images) without even attribution and as de facto 'manager/bottle washer in chief' of the Caz Caswell site, where despite Caz being sympathetic to most requests for reuse. subject to attribution, people still just steal the images (despite which he insists they aren't watermarked), I fully understand why a site that uses information/media without permission, or attribution generates such ire.
But in the case of the now deceased owner of the Lost Bombers Website; Wayback Machine only picked it up in 2007 and I am assuming therefore it probably only became 'high profile' around that time, I doubt that a then 70+ person who was totally committed to what he was trying to achieve and had not (until questions were asked) given any thought to Copyright, or I.P issues.
If he had started his site in 10 years earlier he would have not even stood out from the crowd as most early Webmasters worked on the basis that everything was 'free' (as I discovered when sorting out Copyright during my rescue of Britain In Space).
Yes he was in the wrong, yes he didn't respond to requests to get it sorted an, but maybe if I was in my mid-70's I wouldn’t have been too bothered either.
What was the worst that could happen, suing him (probably not) getting his ISP to 'take the site down' (their reaction probably would be prove he is doing wrong in a court of law). If he had been a young 'hot shot Black Hat', the site would just be relocated to Iran (what copyright) or another 'flag of convenience' country.
But from the comments, I think many are sad that it is gone and hopefully someone with the time, will contact his estate, sort out the copyright issues and resurrect it!
But it won’t be me. As I have a project involving a defunct, but even more iconic site which once I get approval to proceed (if ever) will take a year to rebuild assuming everyone who previously gave copyright permission continues to do so (and there are over a 100 different photographers involved)!.