one cold morning in Anchorage Alaska a young Soldier held his wife and his two-year-old son and kissed them goodbye his wife was pregnant and was going down south to the lower 48 with her son to give birth to her second child it was the height of winter with only a few precious daylight hours each day the plane made his way into the Yukon Territory United States Air Force flight 2469 disappeared and was never seen again the search for the missing plane has gone on for over 70 years this is the story of the Douglas c-54d skymaster lost in the Yukon [Music] [Applause] [Music] so this story has absolutely fascinated me for many years since I found out about it I've kind of been wondering on and off and thought about it a lot what happened to the plane it just flew started its flight path over the Yukon Territory and totally disappeared nobody has found a trace of it and nobody knows what happened to it now it could be debated that this is not really an adventure gone wrong but in a way it is flying in the 1950s was kind of an adventure in itself in fact the people on this plane were actually equipped with parachutes like they each wore a parachute that they could use if they had to jump out of the plane if something happened how terrifying is that and this is also a story that's local to where I am this is the beautiful yugon territory behind me you can see and you'll see throughout this video a lot of local footage where I show exactly what it's like in the depth of the bush in the Yukon so there's a few theories on what actually happened to the plane and I'm going to look at those theories as well as the families and the of the passengers who were on that plane and what they've been dealing with for the last 70 plus years so and if you know of this story and you're looking for some new information I'm not going to have any I'm just taking like existing sources and looking at those and all the research and just kind of compiling it for people who have really never heard of this story before or didn't know much about it so Robert Espy was a master sergeant in the U.S Air Force and on that day in January 1950 as I said earlier he said goodbye to his family and they boarded the plane his wife was seven months pregnant at the time and his son was just not even quite two years old yet and his name was Victor his wife Joyce was originally from India and she they got they met in India and then got married and moved to the states and then they got stationed in Anchorage Alaska which Joyce wasn't too wild about because it was vastly different obviously from the climate of India so she didn't really love Alaska and the cold so she was going to go have her baby where there it was a little bit nicer and where there was people that she knew the plane also was carrying eight crew members and the rest are all U.S servicemen flying down south the plane at the center of this story is a World War II era transport carrier based out of El Paso Texas it was a big snub-nosed plane with a crew of eight and it could carry up to 50 passengers it was actually a four engine plane that was specifically set up for passenger transport it was a military version of a Douglas dc-4 so instead of two engines it had four and it was a big plane with a 33 meter or 110 foot wingspan and a six meter or 20 foot high tail now on the plane Joyce and Victor sat next to a guy named Roy sergeant Roy Jones he was a good friend of theirs and knew her husband really well as they were in the uh Air Force together and Roy was at the end of his service and he was going home to be discharged Roberts or his husband later said that his last words to her were if anything happens hand the baby over to Roy so the flight was supposed to leave that early that January morning but there was actually troubles with one of the engines so it stayed on the base as they completed repairs on it it finally departed at one o'clock in the afternoon on what was supposed to be an eight-hour flight and the flight path was over some of the most rugged and desolate Terrain in North America but they were topped up with fuel and had plenty for the eight-hour flight and the weather was clear on takeoff it was really cold it was -31 Celsius or minus 25 Fahrenheit so a chilly day but clear at least now this flight path is a common one it's called the Northwest staging route which was basically a highway through the sky it follows the Alaska Highway and is a flight path that's actually still used to this day in 1950 the route had an emergency strip and a radio station every 100 miles and that's because this Air route from Anchorage to Montana was notoriously rough so they had these radio checkpoints every 30 minutes so they could check in with with people on the ground this is meant to keep the pilots on track and out of the many mountains in the area and the standard operating procedure at the time was for the aircraft to check in at all those stations along the way so the plane made it to Northway Alaska then Flew Over the border into the Yukon and they were pretty much on schedule when they checked in there at Snag Yukon and they were just off a minute or two they reported in at 309 local time just over two hours after takeoff Now snake is a tiny tiny Gold Rush settlement that's located on the White River snag also has a crazy dubious honor in 1947 it set the record that still stands today for the coldest place in North America those temperatures were a staggeringly cold minus 62 Celsius or minus 81 Fahrenheit and that still stands today thank goodness so that was just three years before this happened so it kind of gives you an idea of how darn cold Loop could be out there so when the chicken was snag the crew told the ground crew that they were things were going okay that they were flying at ten thousand feet and they were getting a little bit of ice on the wings and there was some turbulence but other than that things are going fine and the sky Master expected to reach the next station at asiac in about 30 minutes but they never reported in that's checking with snag was the last that anybody ever heard from the skymaster when the skymaster failed to check in at asiag they knew something was immediately up soon after the U.S and Canadian militaries launched a rescue operation that they dubbed operation Mike Robert Espy found out about this well he was still in Anchorage and wanted to get to White Horse as soon as he could he wanted to help in the search to find his missing family [Music] he was given permission to leave his post in Anchorage and tried to get a flight to White Horse but there was no fights that he could get on so he actually hitchhiked the whole way in the freezing cold of winter when there was the highway was total crap compared to what it is now it was basically a gravel road so we hitchhiked that whole way 1100 kilometers or 680 miles the whole way to Whitehurst and actually made it he made it in time to jump on the first surge plane that went up they searched for around nine hours and found absolutely nothing so they stopped in at snag and talked to the radio operators who were the last to speak with the crew on the plane and they kind of just reiterated what they had told them that nothing major was happening that they had a little bit of ice on the wings but things were going okay so and by a weird coincidence there was this huge military operation between the U.S and Canada it was an exercise that was happening and so there was tons of soldiers in the vicinity so those soldiers nearly 7 000 of them were able to join in on the search more than 80 planes flew around looking for that missing skymaster and a Wild Side Story to all of this is that some of those planes did not stay in the air either conditions were horrible at that time of year and especially for pilots who didn't have the northern flying experience in total four surge planes crashed looking for the skymaster and by some Stroke of Luck nobody was killed on any of those planes one of them was a DC-3 that went down in the southern Yukon and is still there to this day people actually can hike to it to go and see the remains of what's left of the plane and that pilot actually hiked out took him days to hike out to get to the road which he had seen I guess earlier while they were flying over it and he saved the lives of everybody who was on that plane that plane had nine people on board and they just got stuck in the valley in some kind of downdraft and they just couldn't Ascend out of the valley foreign for days but it was just hampered by the crappy weather the technology at the time and the conditions on the ground and in 1950 there was no radar coverage in the area it just didn't exist then the day after the plane went missing the area got a huge snowfall so that easily could have covered up any trace of the plane U.S and Canadian planes flew grid patterns all along the flight path peering out their frosted Windows looking for that down plane but just never found a trace of it and the first days of the search were a bit of a Gong Show because there was all these tips coming in from the public but the public was mistaking that military exercise where they had bombs going off maybe not bombs but explosions going off and flares and stuff and people were thinking that that was a down plane but it wasn't so the rescue workers would go looking in the wrong area for the plane critics of the rescue mission say that while the Air Force was great at some things they weren't great at searching for missing planes they weren't trained in how to search for people and because of the cold and those planes that weren't meant to fly in these conditions they figured that the spotters were probably looking through frosted Windows the whole time and which hampered their ability to be able to see anything so in the end a massive search area was actually looked at and some places where they thought that the most likely that it was most likely where the crash happened they were searched up to five times in the same area it was like they just did a once and over they actually did some pretty intense searching it sounds like it ended up being the largest and most costly search in the Northwest a few weeks later though on February 14th all of the U.S aircraft was rerouted to the Gulf of Alaska there was a bomber that went missing and it was carrying a nuclear warhead on it so the search for the missing skymaster kind of became secondary to finding that nuclear warhead and then not long after that the search headquarters in Whitehorse was shut down families say that everything just stopped after that they got no explanation of what happened to their family no word of whether when the search would continue if ever and then they just received death certificates the accident report recommended that they start searching in the spring of that same year but that search never happened nobody ever went to search again for this missing plane in an official capacity the families have been fighting for 70 plus years to figure out what happened to their families they've signed petition they've contacted the U.S government to try and get the search going again but it's nothing has worked they have no answers on What happened to their families and the skymaster Crash remains one of the worst Aviation disasters in Canadian history and it's actually a bit of an anomaly here in the Yukon because while there has been a lot of plane crashes like 500 over the years all of them have been recovered except for a couple but people in the Yukon and actually all over the place are still trying to find this plane the local rescue organization the Civil Air search and rescue Association uses valuable training time for volunteers to search for the plane the people haven't been forgotten about there's lots of people still trying to find them but resources are difficult to come by and it's a huge remote area that's now got 70 plus years of vegetation and growth and everything else over top of it but now they're using train spotters search patterns and they take a really methodical approach in their searching so what happened there's a bunch of theories out there like so many that I can't even cover them here because there's so many theories did it fly off course did it fly into a mountain did it hit a lake crashland into a lake and break through the lake and get immediately covered with ice and then is never seen again there's a recent CBC documentary called skymaster down which is really interesting you should check it out if you can but there was a daughter of the radio operator on it and she said that all her dad had to do to Signal distress was tap a switch that was right next to him so I've been very quick for him to be able to let the everybody know that something was wrong with the plane but he didn't do that which makes people think that something happened really fast and immediately that they had no chance to react they also talked to Searchers from casara who said that the plane couldn't go over ten thousand feet because the cabinet wasn't pressurized and the mountains in that area went up to seven thousand feet it was fairly mountainous all around with lots of exposed Alpine slopes if a plane had gone down above four thousand feet they say that it would have been spotted by now so their guess is that ice coated the airplane and they possibly hit moderate turbulence then the plane stalled while they were maybe in one of those valleys and they just couldn't get out like that other plane that crashed they think it likely went nose down and crashed into the trees or a low spot in the ground a fuel then burned and then it snowed immediately after and by the time surge planes arrived they couldn't see anything because it was all covered by snow another local pilot talks about the planes that they were using to do the searches and he said to fly one of those high-speed airplanes in bad weather with remote Wilderness and not all great visibility would be a total nightmare they had thick bulletproof canopies and they were flying in this remote strange country with primitive primitive air navigation which takes a lot of practice to get good at so there's a lot of factors going against the Searchers another theory is that it flew off off Direction into the Gulf of Alaska and it might have just ditched in the ocean but that doesn't explain why there was no more radio communication and just past snag there's this big deep lake called Wellesley Lake and the plane had been rumored to be there for years during this documentary they were able to do some underwater scans of the lake and they did it a few times and didn't find anything and nothing has popped up you know on the shore of any of these lakes or something you would think that you know some of the the following spring if it did go down in the lake that the some of the remaining plain or things that float from the plane would have popped up and been on the shore somewhere then there's the Saint Elias mountains Theory now those are big mountain ranges and Ice Fields glaciers a plane could easily disappear if it went down in that area it's such a massive unoccupied area some people think this is the most likely Theory and the radio operator in Snag said that Pilots had a tendency to take shortcuts and if they decided to just go south they'd actually fly straight into the Front Range of the Saint Elias mountains not knowing that that was what was ahead of them and so it could have hit the mountains and is now buried in a glacier then there's reports from Watson Lake that same day there was a lot of reports of people seeing flares being shot into the sky and that area was also searched and nothing was found there either and this is an interesting one three weeks after the skymaster went missing a man from burwash Landing named Albert Isaac came into the RCMP Detachment and filed a report he said the day after the plane went down he saw this massive snow slide with several scavenger birds in the triers and trees nearby now he was a local indigenous fella who was a hunter Trapper and all that and pretty much knew the landscape and the area like the back of his hand so that really stuck out to him is something that you know if he saw these scavenger Birds there then something had to be going on in that area so police did actually fly out to the area and circled it a few times and didn't find anything so one other theories that it didn't even crash in the Yukon that it made its way out of the Yukon and down into BC and there's a lot of people who have been searching for this plane and looking you know at reports and news articles and you know they're looking at Google Maps now and satellite images of areas where it could have crashed and there's some people were convinced that it went down and on the BC Montana border at a mountain called gold mountains there was actually a plane crash there around that time and it was well documented it was reported in papers on both sides of the border and locals recall seeing flares and Signal Fires for days after the crash there was also two young boys who claimed that they saw the plane go down but that area was never officially searched so this disappearance is a total mystery and that's still a misery to this day so if you are a hunter if you're a relic Hunter and you're interested in solving Mysteries come on up to the Yukon and try and find this darn plane because the families would be more than grateful to have this mystery solved and there's also you know there's lots of traffic in the air there's like researchers and minors and geologists delivery routes there's lots of people flying planes in the area and the fact that it's never been spotted no trace of it is kind of weird and so as it stands right now casara still searches for the plane every summer they go out on training exercises and they say they cover a little bit more of the territory every year towards the Alaskan Border in hopes of finding the plane but somewhere out there is the wreckage of this plane which is also a graveyard for 44 people [Music] the families of the victims I feel so bad for them they've just never known what happened to their loved ones there's been generations of people who don't know didn't know their family member who was on the plane and never know what happened to them there's people who have died not knowing what happened to their husbands wives Sons Brothers you know it's just super sad so do you have a theory on what happened to this plane let me know in the comments below thanks for watching [Music]