Tag Archives: C-124 alaska

Lost 1952 USAF Transport Found on Glacier in Alaska

“Investigators say aircraft wreckage discovered this summer on a glacier in the mountains east of Anchorage came from an Air Force plane that crashed in 1952, killing everyone on board.

The C-124 Globemaster carried 52 people, according to the Joint Prisoners of War, Missing in Action Accounting Command, which has military casualty experts looking at the debris.

The crew of an Army National Guard UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter spotted the pieces at the tip of Colony Glacier, where it meets Inner Lake George deep in the Chugach Mountains 45 miles east of Anchorage. The JPAC investigators recovered fragments of the plane and possible human remains a few days later.

On Wednesday, JPAC spokeswoman Capt. Jamie Dobson said the plane is believed to be a Douglas C-124A Globemaster, a heavy-lifting transport plane that crashed Nov. 22, 1952 while approaching Anchorage. The scattered wreckage has apparently been slowly moving with the glacier for 60 years, she said. The ice field where the wreckage was found earlier this month is more than 12 miles from the crash site.

“The evidence does positively correlate to that wreckage,” Dobson said.

The Globemaster was flying from McChord Air Force Base in Washington. With giant bay doors under its nose and four turboprop engines, the Globemaster, nicknamed “Old Shaky,” was the largest cargo plane in the American arsenal at the time, the only aircraft capable of carrying a tank or bulldozer — or 200 soldiers……” (Full Story Here)