By Laura J. Nelson, Los Angeles Times –
LOS ANGELES — The shifting of an Alaskan glacier has released wreckage and frozen remains from what is believed to be a military cargo plane that crashed 60 years ago, killing everyone aboard. And for the first time, the military has been able to complete a recovery mission for the missing plane.
Officials believe the wreckage is that of a C-124 Globemaster that crashed Nov. 22, 1952, near Mount Gannett. The U.S. Air Force plane went down near Alaska’s so-called graveyard of airplanes, where jagged mountains make landing particularly difficult.
A Black Hawk helicopter crew discovered the yellow spars of debris June 10 during a routine training mission for the Alaska Army National Guard. The wreckage was found on Colony Glacier, a pitted glacier riddled with crevasses 40 miles northeast of Anchorage, nearly 14 miles from where the plane crashed.
The military has shipped the remains to labs in Hawaii, where experts will analyze what is expected to be bones from some of the 41 passengers and 11 crew members, Army Capt. Jamie Dobson said.
The wreck was first identified days after the crash by a member of the Fairbanks Civil Air Patrol and a member of the 10th Air Rescue Squadron, according to an Associated Press report from 1952.
After returning from the site, the civil air patrol member — Terris Moore, who was president of the University of Alaska — told reporters that the plane “obviously was flying at full speed” when it struck Mount Gannett. The plane appeared to have slid down the cliffs and exploded, spewing wreckage across several acres.
At the time, the tail was intact enough for identification. Moore said he found blood on a blanket and noticed the “sickly-sweet smell of death.”
The wreckage quickly sank deeper into the glacier. When a rescue team hiked there soon after, it found nothing.
Among the missing was Isaac Anderson, who left behind a young widow and a toddler son. His granddaughter researched the crash for 12 years, but said she was told by the military that recovering remains would be too involved and too expensive.
“I’m overwhelmed,” Tonja Anderson of Tampa, Fla., told the Associated Press on Wednesday. “If they can bring me one bone of my grandfather or his dog tag, that would be closure for me.”
Officials are moving to have the area legally protected, Dobson said, to preserve any more remains or artifacts that may emerge from the glacier.
