December 5, 2023

Note: Discussion settings are revised now – it’s easier to leave comments.

Somewhere in this remote mountainous terrain lie the remains of a tragedy.

There was a plane that went missing back in January of 1950. It was a military Douglas C-54D, number 42-72469, on a route from Alaska to Montana with 44 people on board. Last anyone heard from it was a radio call from near Snag, Yukon. Most likely a progress call-in to update flight status and location. The next call-in was supposed to be when they got over Aishihik, Yukon, southeast of Snag, but that call never came and no one has heard from the flight since. If I remember correctly, the flight crew reported some icing taking place during the Snag report – a piece of the overall puzzle that might have played a big part. Icing is when there’s a build-up of layer of ice, especially on the leading edges of the wings which dramatically interferes with airflow, hence lift, of the wing. There have been numerous crashes of planes over the years due to icing.

Since it was a military plane with military personnel aboard there was an intensive search for it, but the January snow both impeded the search and covered up any crash evidence. At first the weather was horrendous. Some planes involved in the original search crashed while searching in the bad weather, but it seems everyone survived those. The official search gradually tapered off and a couple of years into it, other events of higher priority concerning military aircraft occurred rendering the search for 2469 pretty much terminated, but relatives of the missing and other interested parties continued to search and follow up tips, and they have done so to this day. There was a documentary a few months ago about a revived interest in the search. Seems like the new search is dubbed Operation Mike, after the name of the pilot. That might have been the name of the original search too.

There are blogs out there where people post whatever information they might have, and some swap out stories of eyewitness reports, conspiracy theories, and so forth, so for sure, the search has become a thing once again.  In fact, sometimes it seems the search itself has overtaken the thing being sought.

The implications of finding this aircraft are not to be taken lightly. Thousands of people have been searching for scores of years. There has grown a veritable cult of people from all walks of life, commenting on social media with tips, speculation, mundane technicalities, of typical interactional traits. There are arguments, insults, lots of one-upmanship, and to tell the truth, sometimes it seems that “The Search” and its inherent camaraderie has found a life of its own seemingly divergent from the objective of finding the object sought. Individuals and organizations purporting to be professional searchers seem to have found sustenance in the search for this airplane. Things will change for a lot of people if it is found.

I became interested in the search, (not so much “The Search”) as lots of other folks have, not least because it’s understood by all of us that everybody deserves a proper burial. Being a veteran myself, it’s unsettling to think those guys were in the service just like I was and they’re MIA – still are after all those years. Somewhere up there enduring those long, dark winters in icy cold, lonely mountains, the bones of some boys that were serving their country during peacetime still lie, but it was a time when a horrific war was still fresh in everyone’s memory.  Bones of those boys and those of a lady with a young child who were traveling with them.  There must be relatives of the missing personnel who are still around and who’d like to have closure too.

People are searching using Google Earth. Most of the imagery is blurry up close and when you zoom out far enough to get good resolution it’s usually from too far up to see what you’re looking for. Still, it’s what’s available, and until they come up with some way to achieve better resolution, it’s all we have.  You can get to a point looking at it where you get goofy, but it is possible to make out some things.  The area of wreckage this post discusses is located a scant few hundred yards off a straight-line path between Snag and Aishihik, Yukon. Takes some dedicated searching. You just have to keep telling yourself that those souls are waiting to properly be laid to rest and the wreck is out there somewhere.

Regardless of the possible negative impact it might have on “The Search”, I made the decision to share pictures of the things I’ve found. There’s some interesting stuff in that mountainous area of the imagery in the opening picture of this article. Up close, the stuff in the area of interest looks like it could be wreckage, but it would help if a person was familiar with parts and pieces of a C-54, to make sense of any of it. Besides, if this is wreckage, it would appear that the aircraft smashed into that mountainside pretty violently and there are very few large pieces. A person looking for an intact aircraft carcass would be sure to miss this wreck. You have to zoom in till it gets almost blurry to see things, in fact at first glance without really looking closely, you won’t see much of anything. 

If what this post describes is the wreckage everyone is looking for, it is disappointingly pulverized.  As mentioned, there are few big pieces of a recognizable plane, but wreckage is there, you just have to study what you can see.  But then, that’s the hard part.  It takes determination and tenacity to pore over the imagery at the level required in order to find something.

It seems there are other missing planes in that part of the world, so the possibility, however unlikely, exists that the wreckage found here might be from another crash, but even if is, it’s still wreckage. The picture below illustrates just how difficult it is to make out things from the available imagery.

As you can see, there’s hardly anything discernible. Especially from this far up. To the left of the yellow pins are things that have been identified by zooming in and in many cases editing the lighting, contrast, color saturation, etc., to be able to see the things a little more clearly. The areas with the circles drawn have literally piles of debris in them. In fact, it was the area in the circle on the left that initially drew my attention to this site, but the circle wasn’t there then. Lots of interesting objects. The ever-so-slight color variation in that area is from what might have been a fire from long ago.

All around this site you can find items with symmetry and shapes that do not occur in nature. Circular objects, mangled sheet metal, flat pieces that leave shadowing noticeably different from that of rocks, pieces with perfectly straight lines and right angles, etc., but you have to zoom in, and in most cases edit lighting to be able to see them.

To gain a better understanding of why everything is so hard to discern, consider this: What remains of the craft appears to have undergone an extremely violent collision with the mountainside, leaving little of the craft large enough to recognize and/or identify. The large area of the scattered debris indicates there was probably a big crash. There have been 70+ years of rain, snow, mud, possible avalanches, high winds to blow around lighter pieces, and probably years of high intensity sunlight to bleach coloring. Aluminum, from which the fuselage is predominately constructed, oxidizes and takes off-white, grey, and greenish colors of the proximate environment, making it more difficult to see. There was a devastating 9+ magnitude earthquake back in the 60s not far away in Alaska which would have undoubtedly shaken things around, especially anything that might have been precariously clinging to a steep mountainside. Some of the items appear to be half buried in what may have been mud from rains. On top of all of this, you have to use grainy, pixelated imagery to be able to try and figure out what it is. Don’t really mean to complain so much about the imagery, it’s probably better than psychics and crystal balls.

To illustrate the difference between the original imagery and what things look like after editing, the following pictures from the imagery are shown:

The above picture is from original satellite imagery unedited. Looks like nothing but rocks.

This lower picture is approximately the same image after a bit of editing lighting and color, no object in the image has been altered. It looks to be the front of an engine in the red circle. The yellow lines point to what look like cowl flaps and the blue line could be a propeller blade, bent up (bent to the viewer’s right) in the 10 o’clock part of the circle. If you Google Pratt & Whitney R-2000 Twin Wasp engine, you can find not destroyed engines to compare to this image. The level of detail needed to positively identify this as the P&W engine, unfortunately is just not there.

The next image looks like part of an aircraft tail section in the center red circle. Is it from a C-54?

The next image is what looks like a cargo door in the larger circle. If you look closely, protruding outside the left side of the circle might be the accompanying cargo door (I believe there were two doors together that closed onto each other), but it’s not as discernable. Whatever that is in the smaller circle is unidentified. I call it the bird cage. It is definitely man-made, so what is it doing out here on a mountain top in the middle of nowhere miles and miles from the nearest road? Although size scale is near impossible with the fuzzy imagery and uneven terrain, this object would still be way too big to be something a hunter could have lugged up that mountain. If you have any idea, please leave it in the comments.

The image below is somewhat harder to make out, but it appears to be an engine nacelle still attached to a part of a wing. There are corroded cowl flap plates in the roundish area on the right of the center circle, and on the left side of that object and still in the circle, there is a nice black, symmetrical curve with a greenish coloring inside the arc. That curve looks to be the leading edge of the wing and the greenish part would be the inside of the wing, possibly a fuel tank bulkhead. It’s hard to discern whether the thing is right side up. To the left and overlapping the wing piece is a rather large round piece of crumpled sheet metal. Some of that piece is outside the circle. This whole section of debris is likely to have been some of that which tumbled down from the impact area.

This last picture is of a basket-shaped object lying on its side, maybe it’s something out of the plane’s cargo bay. Maybe it’s a piece of the plane. It’s near the ridgeline at the top of the hill, so whatever it is it must be pretty heavy to not have been blown off the hill for almost 74 years:

We can keep searching, but dare we find it?