Unsolved Histories episode 2: ‘The Wreckage’

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.

In 1963, a plane carrying military men, women and their families went down in the Gulf of Alaska. The flight crew radioed the tower, asking to change altitude from 14-thousand feet to 18-thousand feet, but it was the last contact anyone had with the aircraft. The key to finding out more about Flight 293 is locating the wreckage of the DC-7C airliner on the bottom of the ocean – some 8-thousand feet below the surface.

Keith Pugh took part in the one and only search for Flight 293 just hours after the crash.

Pugh was a Coast Guard radar operator barely out of his teens in 1963. He was stationed aboard the USCGC Klamath, cruising from Seattle to the Bering Sea. It was part of a Cold War assignment to keep an eye on Soviet and Japanese fishing vessels.

“We were pulling into Women’s Bay, Kodiak, Alaska for fuel,” Pugh said. “About a half-hour later, we got a radio message that an airliner was overdue from Seattle to Anchorage. Another half-hour later, we were underway, headed for the last reported position.”

Pugh said a Canadian Air Force plane was first to spot debris west of Annette Island. So the Klamath headed in that direction. A Japanese merchant ship was first on the scene. They’d picked up a few uninflated life rafts which they passed over to the Coast Guard crew.

“[We] took over [the search], since we had an air search radar, we had a Coast Guard 95-foot patrol boat, we had a buoy tender and a Grumman Albatross flying overhead,” Pugh said. He says the Coast Guard searchers found “seat cushions, some of them had the seat with them – we found luggage, just one or two pieces.”

Finding a haunting memento

The searchers recovered only a few obvious pieces of what was believed to be human tissue, but no bodies. They did retrieve at least one haunting memento that was likely lost by a passenger on Flight 293.

“We found a 35mm slide,” Pugh said. It was floating in the waves.

“It’s a souvenir slide of the Space Needle. This would be a year after the Seattle World’s Fair, so it was a collector’s piece. So we fished that out of the water.”

After a few days, the search was suspended. The 8,000-foot depth at the crash site was too deep for the technology available then.

A new search?

It’s six decades later and finding the plane still won’t be easy. Any kind of search will be expensive and will require the resources of a well-funded private group or the U.S. Navy. Private underwater archaeology groups operating globally in the 21^st century tend to search only for well-known targets. These include naval vessels sunk in famous battles or storied aircraft, like Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra. Or Gus Grissom’s Mercury capsule.

Scott Williams is an archaeologist for the Federal Railroad Administration. He’s also a volunteer researcher, diver and president of the not-for-profit Maritime Archaeological Society. Williams was part of the group that recently verified the identity of a Spanish galleon lost off the coast of Oregon 400 years ago.

Williams estimates that a search for Flight 293 might cost tens of millions of dollars at a minimum. And, like the recent search for the Boeing 777 Malaysian airliner MH-370 that disappeared in 2014, spending all that money might not turn up anything.

“As those bits and pieces settle through 8,000 feet of water, they move. They don’t sink straight down,” Williams said. “They’re going to hit currents. Some of them are going to kind of drift one way or the other.

“So, it’s not like you’re going to have one crash site with an airplane sitting on the bottom. You’ve probably got a debris field of little pieces over a huge area.”

Related reading: New KSL podcast ‘Unsolved Histories,’ sheds light on disappearance of Flight 293