Andy Rector hasn’t given up on the search for a U.S. military plane with 44 people aboard that disappeared over the Yukon 75 years ago. He is involved with a group that does “fairly intensive searches” for the missing plane in key areas across the territory.
Rector is president of the Skymaster 2469 CAN/AM Society, which organizes and carries out searches for the Douglas C-54 Skymaster 2469. The group is made up of people with varying experiences in aviation and searching for wreckage. One member studies glaciers.
A small crew is currently preparing for an upcoming search mission, although the exact search area has yet to be identified, per Rector.
A tribute was held late last month to mark the 75th anniversary of the plane's disappearance on Jan. 26, 1950. Some members of the aviation community and those with ties gathered online to read aloud the names of the civilians and military members on board the missing aircraft, hold a moment of silence and discuss the continuing search.
The Skymaster disappeared during non-wartime activity, while flying from Anchorage, Alaska to Montana. The stories of the victims’ families are told in a CBC documentary called Skymaster Down. The last known communication from the plane was by radio to an outpost in western Yukon.
“At 23:09, they identified that they were at Snag,” Rector said.
But the next station along the route never heard from them.
At the time, newspaper headlines around the world carried the story, the CBC documentary writeup notes. While the U.S. military reportedly stopped looking a few weeks after the search, and the families were issued death certificates for their loved ones, the society that Rector is involved with keeps hope that they will find it — and bring closure.
Rector told the News about the group’s most recent and upcoming searches for the plane.
The group works together to identify search sites. The summer 2024 operation took place near Snag using a statistical approach to narrow the search area. Rector, Michael Rocereta and Spring Harrison participated in the 2024 search. The three men are planning another search party in 2025.
“The way that we organized what our flights was by looking at the contours of the ground and the valleys in between and drawing up flights that would cover as much of that as possible in one flight,” Rector said.
Rector explained that as the pilot navigated the sky above the mountainous terrain, a searcher by his side scanned the ground “looking for any metallic objects, anything that would reflect sunlight, anything that looked like it didn't belong."
“Different colours and reflections is what we're really looking for,” he said.
Rector was the searcher on most of the flights. He felt confident in their search method. One indication of the approach's strength is that he was able to spot small orange flagging tape on the ground.
“It indicated that we could see quite well to the ground in fairly good detail,” he said.
“Our coverage was fairly good.”
The group provides a “missing feature” in the whole search-and-recovery system, according to Rector. They haven’t asked for much government support to carry out their work. Self-sponsorship in addition to donations and fundraising that come their way keeps them going.
More than seven-and-a-half decades later, the society’s goal remains to locate the missing plane.
Rector doesn’t know exactly what to expect if they do find it.
“The reason that we're doing this is for closure for the family members that are still alive,” he said.
“If not for them, then the descendants and other family members who don't have the living memory but still care about their family members that are out there, and that's what drives us.”
Contact Dana Hatherly at dana.hatherly@yukon-news.com
