Two hours into the flight, the crew radioed that ice was forming on the wings but conditions were otherwise normal. The plane never made its next check-in and vanished without a trace.
After an extensive but unsuccessful search, the Air Force dropped all efforts to find the plane.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency only searches for service members lost in combat, but no federal agency handles operational accidents or peacetime incidents.
The Air Force conducted a massive search in February 1950, only days after the crash, mobilizing thousands of American and Canadian troops and more than 25 aircraft in Operation Mike, named after one of the crew members. In the first three days, search planes covered 88,500 square kilometers in brutal winter conditions. Four search aircraft crashed during the operation, though all crew members survived.
The Yukon has over 500 documented aircraft wrecks. Only a handful remain unaccounted for—and the Skymaster is the largest.
The Civil Air Search and Rescue Association and volunteers have searched for decades, using the case as a training exercise and conducting aerial searches over the rugged terrain between Snag and Aishihik—an area of approximately 4,500 square miles.
After an extensive but unsuccessful search, the Air Force dropped all efforts to find the plane.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency only searches for service members lost in combat, but no federal agency handles operational accidents or peacetime incidents.
The Air Force conducted a massive search in February 1950, only days after the crash, mobilizing thousands of American and Canadian troops and more than 25 aircraft in Operation Mike, named after one of the crew members. In the first three days, search planes covered 88,500 square kilometers in brutal winter conditions. Four search aircraft crashed during the operation, though all crew members survived.
But on February 14, 1950, a B-36 bomber carrying a nuclear weapon went missing over the Gulf of Alaska—the first "Broken Arrow" incident in U.S. history. All search resources were redirected, and the military never returned to the Yukon after the snow melted.
The Yukon has over 500 documented aircraft wrecks. Only a handful remain unaccounted for—and the Skymaster is the largest.
The Civil Air Search and Rescue Association and volunteers have searched for decades, using the case as a training exercise and conducting aerial searches over the rugged terrain between Snag and Aishihik—an area of approximately 4,500 square miles.
The team's new approach combines synthetic aperture radar, multispectral satellite imagery, and LiDAR, analyzed by artificial intelligence trained to recognize aircraft wreckage—a method far superior to ground searches across 4,500 square miles of wilderness.
"First thing we have to recognize is this is a huge search area," Luers said. "In the last few years, the size of pixels in multispectral imaging has gotten down to 15 centimeters. If this crash is in a bunch of pieces, the technology now exists to pick up small pieces of aluminum and four engines."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950_Douglas_C-54D_disappearance"First thing we have to recognize is this is a huge search area," Luers said. "In the last few years, the size of pixels in multispectral imaging has gotten down to 15 centimeters. If this crash is in a bunch of pieces, the technology now exists to pick up small pieces of aluminum and four engines."
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