The Enduring Mystery of a Plane That Vanished in the Icy Canadian Wilderness With 44 People On Board

The last words Robert Espe, a master sergeant in the United States Air Force, said to his wife, Joyce, were ones of caution: “If you have to jump, give the baby to Sergeant Roy Jones.” It was January 26, 1950, and Joyce and the couple’s young son, Victor, had just boarded a military aircraft traveling from Anchorage to Montana.

Though the disproportionate dangers of flying in Alaska were evident both then and now, the Douglas C-54D Skymaster carrying Joyce, Jones and 42 others was well equipped to handle what was supposed to be a routine transit flight. Joyce was leaving Alaska to prepare for the birth of her and Espe’s second child, while Jones was planning to leave the military so he could marry his fiancée. (Besides Joyce, Victor and a civilian technician, all of the men on board were members of the military.) Hours later, however, Espe’s worst fears were realized when the Skymaster vanished into the icy terrain near the border of Alaska and the Yukon, Canada’s westernmost territory. It has been missing, without the faintest of clues to its fate, for the past 75 years.

In the weeks that followed the disappearance, multiple aircraft sent to look for the lost plane crashed; a large-scale war game commenced nearby; and a bomber that departed from Alaska on a training mission lost a nuclear bomb, prompting the Air Force to divert resources and suspend the search for the Skymaster. The dizzying series of events underscored the perils of flying in this beautiful but unforgiving landscape, which has claimed hundreds of planes and passengers since the first aircraft arrived in the region more than a century ago.

When the Skymaster, under the command of First Lieutenant Kyle McMichael, checked in by radio near Snag, Yukon, approximately two hours into the flight, its crew reported low visibility, icing on the wings and some turbulence, but nothing particularly unusual for that time of year. The Skymaster’s cabin wasn’t pressurized, limiting its flight altitude to 10,000 feet as it traversed soaring peaks—and leaving little margin for error

When the crew failed to check in half an hour later at the next radio relay point near Aishihik, the Air Force realized something was wrong and scrambled a search out of Whitehorse, the Yukon’s capital, with both American and Canadian planes looking for the Skymaster. The craft’s disappearance happened to coincide with preparations for a massive U.S.-Canadian joint military exercise, known as “Sweetbriar,” which brought more than 5,000 troops into Whitehorse. It was slated to commence on February 13.

The search, dubbed Operation Mike, was daunting from the start. Heavy snowfall blanketed the area for the next three days, temperatures hovered at well below freezing, and daylight was scarce. Thirty-plus planes “flew through a heavy snowstorm and icing conditions for four hours yesterday before the long winter darkness closed in,” the Ohio-based Marysville Journal-Tribune reported on January 28, noting that “pilots said sighting a plane from the air would be ‘extremely difficult’” given the terrain.

“What you’re looking for is the definition of a needle in a haystack—if the haystack is mountainous terrain covered in snow, your search conditions are as hampered as they get, and you have no idea how big the haystack is,” says Colleen Mondor, an investigative journalist who specializes in Alaska aviation.

Adding to the difficulties was the fact that the operation relied on large transport planes not designed for search and rescue—planes that flew high and fast, with crews peering through small windows over large wingspans. The Air Force’s accident report lamented that the use of C-47s “no doubt reduced the coverage factor moreso than had an aircraft with better visibility been available.” The search covered more than 165,000 square miles of terrain (or 354,000 square miles, if counting portions covered more than once), but “experience shows that it is possible to pass over a crashed aircraft in mountainous and coniferous country many times without sighting the crash, even when the location of the crash is known,” the report noted.

In other words, it’s plausible that the search planes flew over the Skymaster, but due to their height, speed or snow cover, they simply didn’t see it.

Another calamity hit just days into the search, when a C-47 crashed south of Whitehorse. The pilot managed to hike to a nearby highway and flag down help for the remaining injured crew members. Even with a known location, another aircraft that was dispatched to take photos of the wreck failed to spot it. No such coordinates were available for the elusive Skymaster.

On February 7, another C-47 went down near Whitehorse. The plane was destroyed, but all ten men on board survived, perched on a 7,000-foot peak. It took days for rescuers to reach the stranded crew. The need to rescue more searchers underscored the hostility of the winter terrain—and took away resources from the hunt for the Skymaster.

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The families of the lost aircraft’s passengers and crew waited for any word of their loved ones as the days ticked by, hopeful that they had defied the odds and survived both a plane crash and days and nights in brutal elements.

“It is so heartbreaking, sometimes I think I can’t stand it any longer,” wrote the wife of Staff Sergeant Raymond Mangold in a letter to Air Force searchers. Espe’s anguish was evident in an essay published by the Associated Press on January 30: “My wife and child are lost, and I’m absolutely just stunned,” he wrote. “I haven’t slept or eaten since Thursday,” the day of the disappearance.

Extensive coverage of the search brought a deluge of reports of any sound, flare or radio signal that may—or may not—have been related to the Skymaster. Searchers also received numerous letters from people claiming telepathic messages and dream revelations.

This is a cruel paradox of search and rescue missions: The fear of overlooking a valuable lead also means expending effort on repeated disappointments. “Two more radio signals of no value were added tonight to the long list of clues checked and discarded in the ten-day search,” the AP reported on February 6.

On February 13, another major aviation disaster eclipsed the Skymaster. A B-36 bomber carrying an atomic bomb without its plutonium core flew out of Alaska on a training run. Three of the B-36’s engines failed, and the aircraft began losing altitude. The crew detonated the bomb over the Pacific Ocean before bailing out over a nearby island, where 12 of the 17 men were rescued. “A veil of secrecy has been wrapped around the matter,” the AP reported on February 14. The accident would eventually become known as the first “broken arrow” incident—a term used for mishaps involving nuclear weapons.

By then, Operation Mike was merely a “skeleton force of aircraft and crews,” the accident report noted. The search for the Skymaster waned as Sweetbriar—and the crisis of the missing bomber—ramped up. On February 16, yet another C-47 crashed during takeoff near Snag; a participant in the war game, the aircraft was “the seventh large military plane to come to disaster [in the region] within three weeks,” according to the AP.

Also in mid-February, an Indigenous trapper reported that he’d heard “a sound like thunder,” indicative of a snowslide, while encamped east of Aishihik around the time of the crash. The man spotted carrion birds flying overhead, too. A brief search, over terrain described to the press as “a sea of complexities, gully after gully that could have swallowed the plane and buried it in snow,” yielded nothing.

The headquarters of Operation Mike closed shop on February 20. “It is not unlikely that the aircraft may yet be located after spring thaws have melted the snow from the hills and mountainsides,” the accident report advised.

But the Air Force didn’t go back that spring—or any spring after. The Skymaster was largely forgotten, at least in the official and public domain, creating a chasm of silence for the victims’ families.

Vanished: The U.S. Air Force DC-54 Mystery | Skymaster Down | Free Documentary History

“Year after year, they’re assuming that somebody’s out there still looking—and there wasn’t,” says Andrew Gregg, director of the documentary Skymaster Down.

Espe’s search for his wife and son lasted for the rest of his life. His daughter from his second marriage, Kathy Luers, recalls him dedicating a room in their home to his lost loved ones, outfitting it with a ham radio and covering it in maps of the search radiuses. He raised money in the hopes that a summer search would reveal the fate of the Skymaster. Espe died of a heart attack in 1968, on Luers’ 16th birthday, without any concrete answers.

“This just devastated him,” says Luers. Espe keenly understood the pain the families of the other 42 people on board were experiencing. He “would write letters to those families, saying what wonderful men [their relatives] were,” she recalls. “He sat down and did that, because those were his friends.”

The families were geographically distant, unable to engage in the active dialogue their descendants are able to utilize today on social media today. “Now these families come together, but back then, there was really no way to do it,” says Gregg. “Each one of them was an island unto itself.”

In recent years, private groups and volunteers committed to bringing closure to the families have revived the search. These organizations include the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association and the Skymaster 2469 CAN/AM Society, which was formed after Skymaster Down’s release in 2022. Last summer, members of the society surveyed an area near Aishihik that they hoped would yield clues to the downed aircraft’s fate. They plan to visit again this summer, using donated time, funding and planes.

The society’s president, Andy Rector, says the group is motivated by the family members with whom they continue to engage. “It drives what we’re doing,” he says. “Without them and their interest and how much they care about their families, there are days it would be tough to find motivation, because this is a very difficult search.”

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Though the enduring mystery of the Skymaster’s disappearance sets it apart, such accidents are common throughout Alaska’s 20th-century history. The “father of Alaskan aviation,” Carl Ben Eielson, died in a plane crash in 1929. Eielson’s death occurred just weeks after he participated in the search for another aviation pioneer, Russel Merrill, whose body has never been found. A third legendary pilot, Harold Gillam, participated in the Eielson search; he later froze to death after crashing in 1943.

“When they die in Alaska, it’s in ones and twos and threes, so [the Skymaster] is famous because it’s a lot of people,” says Mondor. “But there were a lot of other accidents in the 1940s and the 1950s that were ones and twos and threes.”

Alaska, first as a territory and then as a U.S. state beginning in 1959, has long borne a disproportionate share of aviation accidents, due not only to its weather and terrain but also to an enduring deficit in aviation infrastructure. The Yukon government maintains a database of more than 500 aircraft wrecks in the territory.

Aviation in the Alaska Territory and western Canada scaled up rapidly during World War II. The region was the epicenter of the American Lend-Lease Program, which transferred nearly 8,000 aircraft to the Soviet Union via the Northwest Staging Route—the same path on which the Skymaster later vanished.

“The whole area was kind of redeveloped as military, and the Northwest Staging Route was really just a parallel highway in the sky that ran along the Alaska Highway,” says Gregg.

Other high-profile disappearances followed the Skymaster. On June 3, 1963, Northwest Airlines Flight 293 vanished over the Gulf of Alaska while transporting 58 service members and 22 of their relatives. A Cessna carrying House Majority Leader Hale Boggs and Alaska Representative Nick Begich went missing on a flight from Anchorage to Juneau on October 16, 1972. No trace of the politicians’ plane has ever been found.

“If it was easy, they would have found it by now,” says Mondor of the task facing Skymaster searchers. “That’s the thing—it’s not easy. It’s a complex part of the world. There are a lot of different factors, and it’s a huge search area.”

Sometimes, though, time and chance give up these secrets: On August 21, 1958, the Grumman Goose carrying Clarence J. Rhode, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s regional director in Alaska, and two other passengers disappeared over the Eastern Brooks Range. A massive search was launched, but it wasn’t until August 23, 1979, that hikers stumbled onto the aircraft’s wreckage in steep terrain. An investigation determined that the plane had crashed into a rock wall due to poor visibility.

Rector looks to the example of Northwest Airlines Flight 4422, which crashed into a mountain in the St. Elias Range near the Alaska-Yukon border in March 1948. The area was so inaccessible by air and ground that the plane’s wreckage wasn’t discovered until 1999, 51 years later, thanks in part to the efforts of private searchers.

“They knew where [the crash site] was,” says Rector. “I think that speaks to how difficult this terrain is. Even if you knew where it was, it’s still hard to find.”

Time and chance are increasingly being aided by the effects of climate change. On November 22, 1952, a C-124 Globemaster crashed en route from Washington State to Alaska. Hampered by adverse weather conditions, the weekslong search effort yielded nothing. It wasn’t until June 9, 2012, that an Alaska National Guard helicopter spotted the plane’s debris during a training run. The wreckage had surfaced from the now-retreating Colony Glacier.

“Climate change is awful, but we’re finding out so much because the ice is disappearing,” says Gregg. “And definitely, airplanes are going to start melting out of the ice.”

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For Espe, the pain of not knowing the fate of his pregnant wife, young son and colleagues never faded. Luers says he spoke of them in the present tense. “He would celebrate their birthdays,” she recalls. “He was always telling stories about them, how funny Victor was.”

The grief experienced firsthand by dozens of victims’ families produced a generational ripple effect for children and grandchildren. Paul Vilga, grandnephew of First Lieutenant Mike Tisik, one of the Skymaster’s pilots, spearheaded a 2012 petition asking the government to restart the search.

“Seventy-five years later, it’s amazing how many people are waiting for closure on this,” says Gregg.

As Pat Moore Haupt, the sister of Skymaster passenger Sergeant Junior Lee Moore, told the Sun-Gazette last year, “I think of him every day and wonder where he is—every day.”

Rector, for his part, says, “We’re continuing to search. We haven’t given up here, because it’s something those of us involved with the search care about, because of the families and getting closure for them.”