Around midnight on June 20, 1944, a military transport en route from England to Washington, D.C., took on fuel in Newfoundland, and then roared off into the darkness and vanished before first light.
The Douglas C-54A Skymaster went missing with a crew of six and one star-crossed hitchhiker, an Army Air Forces sergeant trying to get home on leave.
Were it not for some astute detective work, Flight 277 might not have been found for years. It had crashed 70 miles off course, in Maine, on one of the most inaccessible wilderness mountains in the East.
Read the whole article, it's pretty interesting. Flying out of a northern airfield in poor conditions, a slight navigational error led to a plane crashing in the remote mountains of upstate Maine. Owing to the remoteness of the location of the crash, the airplane has remained in place for some 65 years.
{snark}It's surprising that - since it's the Globe after all - they don't blame a Bush for the crash.{/snark}
This is the sort of thing that absolutely fascinates me - much like the "Lost Squadron" of P38s that was found under hundreds of feet of ice in Greenland or the "Frozen in Time" B29 bomber recovered at the North Pole. This is living history, not the sterile stuff of books but the nitty gritty, dirty history; it's history that leaks oil, history with sharp edges, history that you can feel and smell and touch.
Like finding the proverbial unmolested '57 Chevy in a widow's barn, these finds provide glimpses into the past unlike any other. They are not tainted by human bias; they neither preach nor lecture; they just are. I'd love to visit that airplane in Maine, to gaze upon a piece of our nation's history, a reminder of a different time in a different America.
It's the same sort of feeling I get when I pick up my grandfather's Marlin 336.
That is all.
2 comments:
Interestingly this isn't the only military aircraft wreck site in the Maine woods. There is another one up near Moosehead lake- in 1963 a B-52 went down on Elephant Mountain.
I have the Elephant Mountain crash site on my list of hikes for this summer. It'll be a while before I tackle Fort Mountain.
I almost cried when that B29 burned after all that work and the death of one of the principle restorers. What a heart breaker.
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