Ruminations: Historical U.S.Military Skymaster Disappearance

"Every day our servicemen and women strive to uphold their pledge to leave no man or woman behind, working around the world to identify and recover our missing heroes ..."
"As [we] work to secure a safer, freer world, we remember the service, sacrifice, and courage of those who have not returned from the battlefield."
"We will never cease in our mission to try to bring them home."
Former President Barack Obama

"Excitement ran high in the South Country last Thursday and Friday when a report was turned in to British Columbia Police by a C.P.A. [Canadian Pacific Airlines] Lines pilot, that he had noticed smoke signals south of Elko while flying over that part of the country."
Fernie Free Press, February 9, 1950

The actual aircraft, a Douglas C-54 Skymaster. Photo Supplied

President Obama's response to an urgent call of a next-of-kin to one of a lost 44 members of the U.S. military whose plane mysteriously disappeared on January 26, 1950, asking that a renewed mission to track the location of the plane, be undertaken to bring back the corpses of those who died that fateful day, failed to address the concern of the individual who wrote to him asking that his personal attention be given to the need for closure. Instead, his response was rote, relying on the tradition of never leaving a member of the U.S. military behind.

The fact is that 44 people remain 'missing' and their relatives attempted to initiate a petition to the U.S. government, using a "We the People" system of petition to reopen the search 70 years after the Douglas C-54D Skymaster Serial 42-72459 disappeared on a flight between Anchorage, Alaska and Great Falls Montana. That disappearance represents one of the largest of military personnel groups never to have been found, and nor does the U.S. Air Force to this day appear to have much interest in solving the loss and finding the resting place of those missing 44 personnel.

The plane is known to have crossed the Yukon-British Columbia border in Canada, two hours into its flight. A radio position report represents the last contact with the plane when the report stated the aircraft had passed over Snag, Yukon, five minutes on expecting to be over Aisihik. The four-engine military transport carried 41 military personnel, three civilians one of whom was an expectant mother and her infant son.

One of three planes that crashed while looking for the lost Skymaster. There have been 510 airplane crashes over the Yukon alone. All but four of those wrecks have been recovered. Photo by Andrew Gregg

Speculation is that the plane crashed just north of the B.C.-Montana border, on Gold Mountain. An aerial search was instituted by the United States in collaboration with the Royal Canadian Air Force, the search encompassing about 871,000 square miles. Though this represented an extensive organized aerial search, in the end nothing was found, and it was suspended on February20, 1950. Soon afterward the Korean war broke out and attention swerved to that conflict, the loss of the plane and its passengers set aside.

Speculation abounded, whether the aircraft flew into a glacier and was covered with snow and ice, or that it crashed on the bottom of a frozen lake which eventually melted so the wreckage sank to its bottom leaving no trace by spring. Among the family members of the lost 44 people, thoughts of some people having survived the crash, and giving up hope of discovery, deciding to leave the wreckage and attempt to walk away in search of rescue despite harsh weather and demanding geological terrain, with little hope of survival at that time of year.

A trapper at Beaver Lake, his cabin 40 miles northeast of Williams Lake in the British Columbia interior saw and heard a large aircraft seemingly in trouble as it passed over his cabin. Reports filtered in from the East Kootenay-Columbia region, from Newgate, Revelstoke, Salmo, Cranbrook and Waldo in B.C. Reports came from northern Montana where witnesses reported flares and signal fires sighted. Flares were seen near the 6,507-foot summit of Gold Mountain close to a small frozen lake.

And from the Canada-U.S. border southeast of Cranbrook, B.C. a large aircraft was seen to be in trouble, disappearing and ultimately crashing on Gold Mountain. Two preteens spotted a "large aircraft in trouble" in flight over their parents' Newgate ranch, with smoke pouring out of an engine, heading west and circling toward the south then dropping behind Gold Mountain. A government road foreman at Waldo reported seeing smoke signals, to the B.C. Provincial Police after he had observed three definite large smoke puffs on February 2.