VANISHED
A new documentary returns to a fatal 70-year- old mystery in the yukon.
On Jan. 26, 1950, Robert Espe, a master sergeant in the U. S. air force, waved goodbye to his wife Joyce and two- year- old son Victor on a remote air field outside Anchorage, Alaska. It was a snowy day, a month out from the winter solstice. The sun rose not long before 10 a. m. and by 5 p.m. everything was black again.
Joyce Espe was seven months pregnant at the time. A native of Hapur, India, she was struggling with the Alaskan winter. Along with her son and 42 others, all U. S. servicemen, she was flying from the military base in Anchorage, south over the Yukon, to Great Falls, Mont., on leave. From there she planned to go to Rifle, Colo., where she had close friends, to give birth to her second child.
The Douglas C- 54D Skymaster the Espes boarded was a Second World Warera transport carrier based out of El Paso, Texas. It was a big, snub- nosed metal hotdog of a plane with an eight-person crew and room for 50 passengers. Everyone on board that day was fitted with a parachute. Joyce and Victor sat next to Sgt. Roy Jones, a friend from the base at the end of his service who was flying home to be discharged. “My last words to Joycie were: ‘ If you have to jump give the baby to (Roy),” Robert Espe later told a reporter.
About two hours after takeoff, the Skymaster’s radio operator checked in over Snag, a tiny gold rush settlement on the Yukon’s White River. The air route from Anchorage to Montana was notoriously rough. There were radio checkpoints every half-hour along the way, meant to keep pilots on track and out of the mountains. That check in was the last anyone ever heard from the Skymaster. Somewhere after Snag, it disappeared.
No trace of it has ever been found.
“I’ve gone through all the hysterics and cried myself silly,” Robert Espe said days later. “I’m just stunned.”
Sixty- eight years after the Skymaster vanished, Andrew Gregg was visiting a retired archaeologist named Greg Hare in Whitehorse when he noticed something strange on one of the shelves in the storeroom at Yukon Archaeology. It was a salvaged piece of burnt airplane gear — mangled, green with rust and tarnished by age.
Hare told Gregg the artifact was likely from a drop tank, an auxiliary fuel container used on long haul military flights. Hare and a colleague, Ty Heffner, had found it the previous summer and briefly thought it was a remnant of a missing U. S. military plane that vanished in 1950 with 44 people aboard.
That was the first Gregg, a documentary filmmaker, had ever heard of the missing C- 54. He’s been obsessed with it ever since. On Tuesday, he returned to Toronto from the Yukon, where he was wrapping up filming for a new documentary about the crash, the search, and the mystery titled “Skymaster Down.”
The Skymaster crash remains one of the worst aviation disasters in Canadian history. But in the north, it was an anomaly only by virtue of its scale. There have been 510 airplane crashes over the Yukon alone. All but four of those wrecks have been recovered over the years. But despite decades of searching, including an initial hunt that drew in 98 planes and some 7,000 people, no trace of the C- 54 has ever been found. “This plane just refuses to turn up,” Gregg said.
Gregg’s documentary will follow two tracks. The first will focus on the mystery of the plane itself, and the volunteer pilots that are still searching for it to this day. In the second, Gregg plans to interview the descendants of those lost in the crash, many of whom are still haunted by the tragedy of the vanished plane.
“They’re all waiting,” he said. They’re still hoping to find out what happened to their fathers, grandfathers and uncles. “Everybody’s forgotten about this plane,” Gregg said. But for the families, it remains an open wound.
When the Skymaster failed to arrive as scheduled in Great Falls, the U. S. and Canadian militaries launched a massive rescue mission dubbed “Operation Mike.” Robert Espe learned that his wife and son were missing the same day they left. He immediately took an emergency leave and, according to Andy Beebe, who ran a non- profit dedicated to the hunt, hitchhiked to Whitehorse to join the search.
The rescue mission was hampered by bad weather, old technology and the conditions on the ground. Three planes crashed while looking for the wreck. Crew members from one of them had to be rescued from a remote mountain peak. Espe himself went up with several rescue flights, according to contemporary accounts. “I haven’t eaten or slept since Thursday,” he told a reporter in a story published four days later. “My wife and child are lost.”
In mid- February 1950, the U. S. military called off the hunt. All 44 passengers and crew were declared missing and presumed dead. Seventy years later, Gregg hopes his documentary breathes new life into the search for the vanished plane. He thinks it may well have struck a mountain peak and been buried under the snow and ice. Others believe it sank into a frozen lake or crashed somewhere on the ground. Gregg is convinced that somehow, someday, the wreckage will be found. “The thing about the Yukon," he said, "is that everything eventually turns up."