On a freezing night on January 26, 1950, a U.S. Air Force Douglas C-54 Skymaster departed Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska. On board were 42 service members, a pregnant woman named Joyce Espe, and her 2-year-old son, Victor. They were traveling to get medical help.

About 2 hours into the flight, the crew reported ice on the wings. Everything else seemed fine, but after that message, the plane was never heard from again. It vanished over the Yukon, one of the wildest and hardest places to search in North America.

Now, 75 years later, most people have moved on. But a small group is still searching, hoping to bring the lost home.

The Final Radio Call from the C-54 Skymaster

The last person to hear from the C-54 Skymaster was a young radio operator named Clare Fowler, who was working at a weather station in Snag, Yukon. Around 11 P.M., he got a calm radio message from the plane. The crew said ice was building up on the wings, but they didn’t report any other issues. The next check-in was supposed to happen just 100 miles away, in Aishihik—but it never came.

Snag was known as one of the coldest places on Earth at the time. Just 3 years earlier, it hit a record low of minus 81 degrees Fahrenheit, the coldest temperature ever recorded in North America. The C-54 Skymaster was flying at 10,000 feet without a pressurized cabin, over tall, dangerous mountain peaks. In such freezing conditions, heavy ice can build up fast and take away lift in seconds.

The Best Sitrep for Today's Vets.

Benefits intel, military tech, field-tested gear, untold stories of those who served, and history like you've never heard before. Sign up for the VeteranLife newsletter.

​

Subscribe

Always free. 🇺🇸 | Unsubscribe anytime.

Experts now think the plane may have iced up and gone down—possibly landing on a glacier that later covered the wreckage in snow and ice. Michael Luers, an environmental biologist helping with the current search, understands how dangerous this can be. Years ago, while flying between Iceland and Greenland, his plane also started to ice over.

“The ice on the windshield and wings was an inch and a quarter thick,” he remembered. He survived, but the experience gave him a deep understanding of what the C-54 Skymaster crew may have gone through.

Why the Military Stopped Searching

The Air Force didn’t go back to search for the missing plane because it happened during peacetime. The agency that looks for missing service members only handles cases from war. Since this wasn’t a combat mission, no other part of the government took over.

In February 1950, the Air Force launched a huge mission called Operation Mike. Thousands of U.S. and Canadian troops searched 88,000 square kilometers in freezing temperatures. During the effort, 4 planes went down, but no one died.

At the same time, another mission, Operation Sweetbriar, brought over 5,000 troops to the area. With both missions happening together, there was a lot of confusion. People living nearby thought they saw parachutes or heard the missing plane, but most of those reports came from the training exercise.

Then, on February 14, a U.S. bomber carrying a nuclear weapon went missing over Alaska. It was the first time something like that had happened. The military dropped everything to focus on that emergency, and they never went back to look for the C-54 Skymaster once the snow melted.

Years later, Michael Luers asked a former congressman and Air Force pilot to help reopen the case. He tried, but the Air Force said no. They won’t restart the search unless someone finds clear physical evidence, such as wreckage fragments.

How AI and Satellites Might Solve the Mystery

Jim Thoreson, a former Canadian Air Force member who has been working on the case since 2008, believes that if the wreck is under trees, only science can help find it, and that flying over in a small plane is no longer enough.

In 2022, a documentary titled “Skymaster Down” brought the story back into the spotlight. It helped connect families, searchers like Thoreson and Michael Luers, and Nelson Mattie, a remote sensing expert from the University of Alberta.

Mattie brought in powerful tools such as radar, satellite imagery, and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging). This equipment can find small pieces of metal hidden under thick forests. In line with this, AI will scan the data to help spot anything that looks like plane debris.

In the first part of the search, they’ll use radar data from NASA, the European Space Agency, and Japan’s space agency, along with high-resolution commercial imagery purchased from Vantor (formerly Maxar). If they find strong clues, helicopters and local First Nations teams will check the sites. If needed, a second phase will use LiDAR to search beneath the trees for signs of the missing plane.

Bringing the Lost Home

The project, called the Yukon 2469 Mission, needs $160,000 to begin and around $1.3 million if a second phase is required. Vantor has offered discounted satellite images for $70,000. Donations are being collected through Project Recover’s website.

The team also worked with FamilySearch to identify all living descendants of the 44 passengers. Some families have no surviving relatives, but others span 3 generations. “Without funding, the mission is not possible,” Luers said. “It matters for one reason: to bring loved ones home to their families.”

Read next:

• Mechanical Woes: What's Next for the Air Force's Osprey Plane?
• Symbols in Orbit: The Evolution of Naming Conventions in the U.S. Space Force
• Billy Mitchell: The Visionary Who Transformed Military Aviation

Sources:

• Skymaster Down
• The Enduring Mystery of a Plane That Vanished in the Icy Canadian Wilderness with 44 People on Board