The 1950 Douglas C-54D disappearance

The Claim

44 People and a cargo plane disappeared in western Canada in 1950, and no one has since found a single trace of either the plane or crew.

 

The Douglas C-54 Skymaster was a cargo plane that made routine flights across the United States and Canada between 1942 and the late 1970’s. It was a 4 engined standard transport plane that was mostly used for moving cargo around the hard to reach places in Canada and Alaska.

 

On the 26 January 1950, a Douglas C-54D Skyplane with serial number 42-72469 was scheduled to leave Anchorage in Alaska on a trip to Montana carrying a total of 44 people, which included 8 crew members and 36 passengers, all of which were military personnel except a woman and her young son.

 

The flight departed several hours after its arranged flight time as the plane was having trouble with one of its engines. After the engine was fixed the plane successfully took off and began heading on its route towards Montana.

 

2 Hours after the flight took off it made radio contact as scheduled and reported everything was fine, but this was the last time anyone made contact with the plane. After it failed to reach Montana and all attempts to contact them by radio failed, a search and rescue operation was launched 1 hour after the missed check in.

 

The operation to find the missing aircraft was one of the biggest search and rescue operations ever to be mounted for a missing aircraft at the time, and involved 85 planes and over 7000 personnel, all trying to search an area of 350,000 square miles.

 

After 24 days of searching the operation was eventually was called off on the 20th of February, with letters being sent to the passengers and crews next of kin informing them all aboard the plane were presumed dead.

 

It seems that whatever happened to the aircraft caused all 44 people on board to die, as non of them managed to reach safety, but the odd thing is that no one has found any trace of the crew or the plane.

 

Normally when a plane crashes it sends up plumes of smoke that can be seen for miles, and a cargo plane of this size isn’t exactly hard to miss. To this day not a single sign of the flight has been found, even though there have been countless planes flying the same route over the years, and not one has reported seeing anything.

 

Another strange thing about this disappearance is that when the plane made its last check in 2 hours after take-off, it was already past the ocean part of the journey and there for must have crashed on land somewhere, which would suggest that it should have been found by now.