‘Unsolved Histories’ episode 4: Scuttlebutt
Oct 15, 2024, 3:00 PM
Northwest Airlines DC-7C N285, pictured at an airport circa 1960. This aircraft is identical to the one that crashed on June 3, 1963. (Courtesy Northwest Airlines History Center)
(Courtesy Northwest Airlines History Center)
In Unsolved Histories: What Happened to Flight 293, Scott Williams and aviation historians among other experts discuss exactly what a new search would entail, and what finding the DC-7C might reveal about why it went down.
The pilot at the controls of Flight 293 had thousands of hours of experience stretching back to the 1930s. Captain Albert Olsen was a veteran employee of Northwest Airlines. He had served as chief pilot and had devoted years of his career developing important safety innovations which benefited the entire industry.
Retired flight attendant Darlene Jevne flew with Captain Olsen on several occasions.
Related: New KSL podcast ‘Unsolved Histories,’ sheds light on disappearance of Flight 293
“He was strong on safety,” Jevne said. “We respected him. People liked flying with him. Crews [would] always say, ‘We’ve got him on board. Great.’”
‘Unsolved Histories, What happened to Flight 293’ End of the prop age
Aviation was changing in 1963. Prop planes – and the prop-plane work schedules with generous periods of time off that Captain Olsen loved – were being replaced with jetliners and more rigorous ‘jet age’ work schedules.
Olsen’s son Fred said his father was ready to retire, so he could spend more time playing golf and pursuing new business opportunities in Southern California.
A newspaper clipping from the Olsen family scrapbook shows Captain Albert Olsen and son Fred in the early 1940s. (Courtesy Fred Olsen)
“Flying the old piston planes you could get all your hours in a week and a half, like flying to Tokyo, then to Taipei, then to Taiwan, and then to Korea, and then back to Tokyo, and maybe someplace else and back and then back to Seattle,” Fred Olsen said. “You could have a month to six [or] seven weeks off between the next time you have to go to work. That was the time he could play golf in Palm Desert and go to his house on a golf course.”
Coping with the loss of family aboard Flight 293
Olsen’s children were each profoundly affected by the loss of their father, and each cope in their own way. Daughter Carolyn Olsen Bishop stayed close to home and helped her mother, while launching her own career as a school teacher and raising a family.
Related: Unsolved Histories, Finding Flight 293, Episode 2: ‘The Wreckage’
Fred Olsen chose another path, rarely looking back, and rarely returning to the Pacific Northwest as he lived in Tokyo and became a world renowned ceramics artist.
But Fred shared a bond with his late father through aviation, forged when Fred was a child, accompanying Albert Olsen to the scene of Northwest Airlines crashes.
“I can still see the plane all twisted and everything and how it hit houses in the trees and the street,” Fred Olsen said, recalling one particular crash from the 1950s in Minnesota. “I can remember that … must have been, what, 13 years old?”
Fred never trained as a pilot, but he worked briefly at a small airport in Southern California as a teenager, often taxiing aircraft around the tarmac using knowledge gleaned from his father.
Flying home from Japan after he got word that Flight 293 had gone down, Fred queried the crew of the Northwest Airlines jet that carried him to Seattle about what had happened.
“I wanted to know what happened to the flight,” Fred said. “Most of the pilots know, because it gets around, scuttlebutt gets around.”
Friendly fire?
The theory shared in the cockpit that day, Fred says, was that a missile, accidentally fired by an American fighter pilot, had brought down the DC-7C.
Irene Johnson’s husband was Don Schaap was a member of the cabin crew of Flight 293. She says the man who in 1968 bought the house she had shared with her late husband told her he worked for the FAA in Seattle, and that he had seen a report attributing the loss to a missile. Research confirms that the man did, in fact, work for the FAA, but he has since passed away.
A tax assessor’s photo of the home near Sea-Tac Aiport that Irene Johnson shared with her husband Don Schaap, who was a member of the cabin crew of Flight 293. When Johnson later sold the home, the man who bought it – who worked for the FAA – told her he had seen a report attributing the downing of Flight 293 to a missile. (Courtesy Pacific Northwest Regional Archives)
Retired flight attendant Darlene Jevne said she heard similar stories about Flight 293.
“The scuttlebutt has always been . . . ‘You know, it just doesn’t vanish,’” Jevne said. “They called and wanted to change altitude . . . and they dived straight in. That doesn’t really happen.”
Fred Olsen and his sister Carolyn Bishop Olsen have wondered for 60 years about what happened to their father. And why the DC-7C went down. Each worried that somehow the crash was his fault.
“I still like my missile theory,” Fred said. “It takes the blame away from my dad.”
On Episode 4 of Unsolved Histories: What Happened to Flight 293?, we meet Fred Olsen and Carolyn Bishop Olsen. Andwe’ll try to sort fact from fiction in the scuttlebutt that spread after the plane went down.
