Doesn't even need to be in a lake. The Yukon is HUGE, covered in forest, and has a bunch of mountains. It's very easy for a plane wreck to be very hard to see in a gorge or among trees. Survey technology was very limited in 1950, and after a few seasons of plant growth, a debris field can become almost invisible from the air. And if it's in rough territory, nobody might ever come near it on the ground, or walk right past it without noticing.
Exactly. If it crashed into the forest, you probably wouldn’t be able to see unless you were at ground level and within 30-40 ft of the wreck.
Depending on how dense the forest is and the foliage coverage you likely couldn’t spot it from the air.
Reminds me of search planes during WW2. They go out on search patterns over the Pacific and even with nothing but water, it was easy to miss an aircraft carrier unless you were relatively close (within 10 nautical miles).
But if you’ve read the article, over 500 other planes have all disappeared in the territory and they’ve all been found. So no matter how vast the forest, is they’ve all been found. There seems to be some anomaly with this one.
People have been searching for a lost Dragonfly in the South Island of NZ for decades, we're far smaller (and so was the plane, to be fair) than Alaska! It's a 2.5 hours drive from my town by the Pacific Ocean over the Alps to a wild beach on the Tasman Sea. There's a one day running/cycling/kayaking endurance race from the Tasman coast over a pass in the Southern Alps, down to the Pacific coast. (Guess what it's called)
And the search area(s) is/are reasonably well known now - it was flying to Milford Sound, there were several mountain passes feasible for flying over the Main Divide in a rather underpowered aircraft to get there, and there were some statements from locals in the high country in the east who believe they heard the plane as it flew into the mountains that yielded places to look.
There's a general agreement forming about which area it crashed, but no evidence yet. Makes for good practice in extreme terrain for LandSAR exercises though.
So yeah, far smaller search area, still missing. Google ZK-AFB for more, there's a few books on it, one gent in particular has been searching most of his adult life for it.
Alternatively, the technique used for finding plane crashes has a 99% recall and we're just happening to talk about the 1% that slipped through. Survivorship bias is not out of the question here.
I think this needs its own cognitive term, it's not a survivorship or selection bias, it's just skipping the selection entirely and just focusing on the sample. So here people go "This plane is an outlier, there must be something special about it", as opposed to "We would just be talking about another missing plane instead". Or in the immortal words of Tim Minchin "If I didn't have you, someone else would do"
A Mooney was lost in the Rogers Pass along the Trans Canada Highway. A couple years later EMS in a helicopter spotted it some 50 yards off the highway. The local conifer trees are huge.
Right? Imagine if it’s 500 found out of 1000 known and any number of unknown crash sites that predate the modern flying era. The size of the input data changes the probabilities tremendously.
The above is the Google Earth view of the area. Interestingly you can still see the (former) airstrips from the satellite view; just south of the point at Snag and slightly north of Aishihik; they were part of the Northwest Staging route.
Since the plane radio'ed in at Snag but failed to check in at Aishihik, in theory it would have crashed somewhere between those two points. The biggest lake between those points is Wellesley Lake, depth 65 feet. Might also be on land, anyone good at Where's Waldo?
Incidents like this remind me just how vast the planet is. Zooming out on Google Maps, you might think that compared to our body size, the size of our houses, cities, counties, etc. isn't that large after all; sure you look like ants in comparison but the surface area seems traversable. And even if it's not, we have radars that can scan vast swaths of the surrounding areas, no?
Wrong. The Earth is unmeasurably huge compared to any human-made technology (and that includes radars, cities, etc.), and that's just the surface of the planet. Add the third dimension (and much more difficult to scan, no less) of the oceans and air, and you'd wonder how the heck we can still find our way on flights. It's a fragile tech, and when it crashes (literally), it's almost impossible for us to find where it happened.
Had the same exact sentiment with the MH370 mishap - technology has made the planet seem so small that these type of events up being a good reality check:
A multi million dollar piece of equipment that continuously talks to space can go still go poof, with 200+ people onboard.
In northern Ontario an acre truly in the middle of nowhere costs just a few hundred dollars. An acre next to a road with year-round access to the highway system is more like $10,000.
Most of the value of land is derived from how close it is to the rest of civilization.
> That's why after a plane trip across the country, the amazingly high prices for land/real estate seems like it must be a scam.
Why would it? Lots of empty land in faraway places. You can buy an acre of land in the desert in Nevada for like $500. Of course nobody wants to be there, that's why it's cheap.
Deforestation actually really isn’t much of an issue except in some specific localized areas - and that has required massive work from huge numbers of people over a lot of time.
>> There's a database of over 500 known airplane wrecks in the territory.
Well, this was unexpected. On the one hand, Yukon is larger than the surface of Germany. On the other hand, were there 500 plane crashes in Germany, excluding wars? Turns out far from it: almost 10x less with 62 fatal crashes since 1945: https://www.statista.com/statistics/262867/fatal-civil-airli...
Now maybe not all the 500 plane wrecks were fatal but still that's a disturbing likelihood of a crash. With Germany having some 100x-1000x more intense traffic than Yukon, that's easy 1000-10'000x times more likely to crash in the Canadian wilderness. I think I'll pass visiting that in a plane :)
The crash statistic you got is only counting airliners though, I’m pretty sure the 500 crashes in the Yukon would not appear there, because they aren’t all civilian airliners. The statistic only has 191 for Canada.
I doubt that very much. Lidar "finds" ruins by showing large, regular (round, rectangular) structures which then stand out very much to human analysts. But an airplane that crashes at high speed results in a field of relatively small, irregular debris.
Well sure, if you're lucky. Therein lies the problem, hard to tell until you try and actually find it, because we've no idea what condition it's in and where it ended up.
I’d encourage anyone who doesn’t know the area to check out quite how large the Yukon is in comparison to other places you know. For example:
http://www.comparea.org/GBR+CA_YT
When my grandfather finished his ROTC program for the army core of engineers him and one other classmate got assigned to go to France to rebuild destroyed bridges. I asked him once what his other classmates ended up doing and he had told me they all died in-route on a transport plane headed to Korea. I wonder if this is the one? I didn't ask for more details at the time because it was clearly something he didn't like dwelling on.
Yeah, although AF 447 would like to have a word. ~ one minute freeze of Pitot tubes caused a jump out of normal law and then the dramatic event unfolded.
A Lancastrian (bomber design conversion to airliner) disappeared in the Andes. Decades later bits were found on a glacier. A Trans Canada North Star (same Merlin engines as the Lancastrian) flew into Mt Slesse in 1956. Fragmented debris was discovered by climbers the next spring. Scattered pieces blend in very well on talus slopes.
I lived 4 years in the Yukon, and it is impressively big with very, very few roads.
Even today, there are twice as many moose as people in the Yukon.
We would go on 10 canoe trips and not only not see other people, but not see evidence of people - no "campsites", no roads, no power lines, nothing. And that wasn't even remote by Yukon standards at all.
Sometimes I like to think that this plane was landed in anyone of the 10's of airfields around Snag and the men were the first batch for the MKUltra Project, which started in the early 1950s and officially sanctioned in 1953. It involved illegal activities, including the use of U.S. and Canadian citizens as unwitting test subjects, aiming to develop techniques and substances for use in interrogations and warfare
A) it's big, but in a lake it varnishes easy.
B) lake isn't forest. In winter, it makes an obvious landing option when things go wrong.
C) chances are it crashed, not landed. Perhaps a fire weakened the ice, hot engines etc. If it landed one would expect radios to work.
D) it hasn't been found since (but others have), so I eould suggest it's "not easy to see".
The Yukon is big, and population is sparse, so its possibly on land, but speaking as a golfer, if there's water around, it's likely in it.