When Private Bruce Barrowman boarded Flight 293, he was just 17 years old. Bruce’s loss has haunted his younger brother Greg for decades. At times, Greg has struggled to make sense of what happened, and to find some way to commemorate Bruce and the other 100 passengers and crew who were lost.

Through years of grief and sometimes anger and frustration, Greg repeatedly asked the military to search for the wreckage to find for answers to the big questions about what went wrong and why the DC-7C went down in the Gulf of Alaska. At the same time, the Barrowmans also did what they could to memorialize Bruce and never forget his sacrifice – and theirs, too.

Personal Monuments to Hidden Grief

As Greg began connecting with other Flight 293 families, he learned that many have been trying to do exactly the same thing. Like the Barrowmans, many families felt abandoned by the US government. They hunted online for information about the flight, and some also built private monuments to their lost loved ones alongside their family homes, complete with plaques and flagpoles.

With help from many of those Flight 293 families and from an informal network of aviation and military historians and others simply interested righting a decades-old wrong, Greg Barrowman led an effort to publicly commemorate the loss of those aboard, and to finally dedicate a permanent monument to the tragedy.

Creating a Permanent Memorial

On June 3, 2023, many Flight 293 families gathered near Seattle for a public ceremony marking the 60^th anniversary of the crash. The gathering formally memorialized the six-member civilian crew from Northwest Airlines, and the 95 active duty military, dependents and federal employees who were aboard the plane.

Among the more than 100 people who came from around the United States to pay their respects and to share their stories was Cherie Pipkin-Gardner, Bruce Barrowman’s high-school girlfriend.

“I am so proud to be here, and I’m so grateful,” Pipkin-Gardner, who traveled from Arizona, said. “I think the things that Greg and the rest of his family have done are phenomenal. It’s helped so many people.”

Once the privately funded monument had been formally dedicated at Tahoma National Cemetery south of Seattle, the Flight 293 families gathered for a picnic at Greg Barrowman’s nearby home.

As Close as Our Language Can Come

“I don’t know if you really have closure,” Pipkin-Gardner said, as she shared stories about Bruce and about her lifelong bond with the Barrowman family. “I don’t know if closure is the right word,” she continued, “but I think it’s as close as our language can come.”

On the final episode of Unsolved Histories: What Happened to Flight 293?, the families and friends left behind gather on the 60^th anniversary of the tragic event. For the very first time, as a group united by shared loss, the sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, grandsons and granddaughters commemorate their loved ones and pledge to keep seeking answers about Flight 293, and to be formally acknowledged by the Department of Defense.

List of Passengers and Crew of Flight 293

Special Thanks

Tonja Anderson-Dell, Honored Bound

Greg Barrowman

Don Bennett

Carolyn Olsen Bishop

Al Dams, King County Assessor’s Office

Jim Dever, Evening Magazine

Janet Ahlalook Dozette

Clay Eals, Seattle Times

Karen Forscher

Susan Francis

Cherie Pipkin Gardner

Rosie Geer

Mitch Grayson

Robin Henderson

Gary Horcher, KIRO7 News

Ted Huetter, Museum of Flight

Irene Johnson

Darlene Jevne

Julie Kallem

Tim and Elaine Kangas

Dave Kiffer

Bruce Kitt, NW Airlines History Center

Mike Lombardi, The Boeing Company

Kathy McGuire

Dr. Timothy McMahon, Armed Forces Medical Examiner System

Sally Minick

Bernie Moskowitz

Tim Murphy

Esther Naholowaa

Karen Nix

Fred and Ingrid Olsen

Myron Partington

Luke Preston

Joe Pouliot

Richard Pouliot

Steve Pouliot

Keith Pugh

Dan Pyryt

John Reed

Judi Larson Rice

Jean Sherrard, Seattle Times

Staff Sergeant Naomi Shipley, USAF

Connie Smith

Dr. Kevin Smith, AFMAO

Peter Stekel

Barry Strauch

Staff Sergeant Benjamin Sutton, USAF

Staff Sergeant Zoe Thacker, USAF

Valerie van Heest

John Washburn

Kim Wenger

Suzie Wiley, NewDayNW

Scott Williams

Bill Wixey, FOX 13

Emil Zupo

The U.S. military promises that no wounded or killed service member will be left behind in the theater of war, and every reasonable effort will be made to bring home the remains of those who don’t survive. It’s a comforting promise made to family members of those who serve, and it’s a foundational pledge which dates back to the earliest days of the United States.

“It was coined during the Revolutionary War with the Ranger Battalion that was there at the time,” said Dr. Timothy McMahon of the Defense Department’s Armed Forces Medical Examiner System. “And it’s kind of transitioned into all of our military . . . that we leave no member behind.”

“And I think it goes more so because we’re a fully volunteer armed services,” Dr. McMahon continued. “We have young men and women who are taking the oath to stand watch and protect the citizens of the United States.”

“Knowing that your government is going to have your back at all times,” Dr. McMahon said, “is a very big key and essential part of our military service.”

The Defense Department spends millions of dollars every year searching battlefields and crash sites in former combat areas looking for remains of service members missing in action. When remains of loved ones are discovered and identified decades later, fulfillment of this promise is priceless to family members left behind.

“I knew his family would be happy to finally have him home”

When he was researching a wartime crash that had been lost for decades in the mountains of California, author and historian Peter Stekel actually came across remains of an aviator who had been missing for decades.

“It made me cry, I still get really, really torn up by the whole thing,” Stekel said. “It was humbling. It was amazing. It was wonderful, because I knew his family would be happy to finally have him home.”

However, for some reason, this promise to leave no one behind doesn’t apply to the male and female service members aboard Flight 293. It doesn’t apply to dozens of other flights carrying hundreds of American men and women who went missing while in service to their country.

One of those other flights disappeared in Alaska in 1952, and one of the 52 men on board who went missing was the grandfather of Tonja Anderson-Dell.

Missing, but not Missing in Action

“I was six or seven years old the first time I heard about it,” said Tonja Anderson-Dell. “Because I seen a picture of my grandfather, but hadn’t seen him around my grandmother’s house. And then when I got a little bit older, I became nosy and wanted to know what really happened to him and why no one’s ever found him.”

While she was still a teenager, Tonja set out to find answers about why her grandfather’s plane had disappeared, and why the U.S. military had given up trying to find it.

“My first letter I wrote to pretty much everybody – senators, the Navy, the Air Force, anyone I could think of that could help me,” Tonja said. “ The Air Force was like, ‘No, we’re not doing it, but how about you reach out to the Army?’ The Army said ‘Reach out to the Navy,’ the Navy said ‘Reach out to the Marines.’”

“So it’s pretty much everybody’s saying no, but just sending me in that circle,” Tonja said.

Fighting for recognition for “Operational Loss”

But Tonja Anderson-Dell didn’t give up. She became a crusader for the families of service members who disappeared in what she calls “operational losses” – crashes of aircraft traveling between bases or on training flights or otherwise lost in non-combat situations. These are aircraft that the military has given up on ever trying to find.

“I just felt that when they said they never, never leave our fallen behind, that he was part of that group,” Tonja said of her grandfather. “And to find out that they were not part of that group, I couldn’t wrap my head around, I couldn’t grasp.”

“Because when he raised his hand, he swore the same words that a gentleman who was missing in action had sworn,” Tonja said.

On Episode Seven of Unsolved Histories: What Happened to Flight 293?, we untangle the bureaucracy behind what many families feel is an empty promise to “Leave No One Behind.”

The DC-7C that crashed into the Gulf of Alaska in June 1963 was the workplace for a crew of six professionals from Northwest Airlines, and we met pilot Albert Olsen – with help from his son and daughter –earlier in the series. The early 1960s was a different time, when female flight attendants were called “stewardesses” and weren’t allowed to be married, and the cockpit was the domain of only male aviators.

One of the two stewardesses aboard Flight 293 was a woman in her late 20s named Patricia Moran.

“I’d go up front, and she’d be sitting there, everybody’s sleeping,” said Darlene Jevne, who was also a Northwest Airlines flight attendant 60 years and ago and who considered “Patti” Moran a friend.

“And she’d be scribbling and writing down wonderful things,” Darlene said, because Patti was a poet who published a collection of poems in 1962. “You know, when you look outside of the aircraft when you’re flying,” Darlene continued, “and all the stars in beautiful scenery and the clouds?”

“She put that all to poetry,” Darlene said.

Along with being a poet, Darlene says her friend Patti was already married and pregnant by the time she died aboard Flight 203, and was keeping both a secret from the airline so she could continue working.

Irene Johnson was also a Northwest Airlines flight attendant 60 years ago. She was in the same training class as Patti Moran, but Irene left airline work behind in 1961. She got married earlier that year and then became pregnant, but she worked as long as she could physically still do the job before calling it quits.

Since the “no marriage” rules didn’t apply to Irene’s husband Don Schaap, he kept his job as a steward, what they called male flight attendants in those days, for Northwest Airlines. Don was assigned to work Flight 293.

“There was a knock at the door and it was a colleague of my husband’s and a personal friend, our cabin services supervisor, and he said ‘Irene, can we come in?,’” Irene Johnson said, describing the moment at home with her infant daughter when she first learned that something had gone wrong on Don Schaap’s flight to Anchorage.

“And they said that they’ve ‘lost radio contact with the plane, we want you to know about that,’” Irene continued.

At first, Irene wasn’t overly concerned. She believed in Northwest Airlines’ management, and swore by the company’s safety record. And Irene believed in the DC-7C.

“I was so convinced that everything was going to be okay,” Irene said, “because I had such faith in the airline running a good, tight ship.”

And though the search for survivors was called off, Irene clung to this faith for more than a year. It was the summer of 1964 when she ran into a Northwest Airlines executive during a trip to Minnesota to visit her husband’s family.

“‘Irene, give up that hope. I was at the crash scene,’” Irene said the airline executive told her. “’There was nothing but small debris floating,’” the man continued, Irene said. “’That thing had to have come apart in the air,’” he said.

Those particular words contributed to a conspiracy theory that Irene and many other family members left behind by the tragedy of Flight 293 would continue to believe for decades: that Flight 293 had been shot down by an air-to-air missile.

On Episode Six of Unsolved Histories: What Happened to Flight 293?, we meet the crew and learn how those they left behind have tried to cope with their loss and to move on with their lives. We also examine the origins of the more sinister theories for why the DC-7C went down, and try to get closer to the truth about what could have possibly gone wrong.

When Flight 293 crashed into the Gulf of Alaska in June 1963, it wasn’t the first time a Northwest Airlines DC-7C serving as a military charter between McChord and Elmendorf Air Force bases had gone down in the water. In October 1962, the same thing happened to another Flight 293, but with a completely different ending.

“I don’t remember the exact words, but they told us we had a runaway propeller and we kind of knew what that was,” retired Air Force fighter pilot Richard Pouliot said. Pouliot was a passenger on the Flight 293 of October 1962, on his way to a new assignment in Alaska. He passed away at age 90 in May 2024.

Runaway Prop

“It was on the left inboard engine,” Pouliot said, describing how the DC-7C he was aboard began experiencing a major mechanical failure known as a “runaway prop” or “overspeeding propeller.”

“The propeller really winds up and it gets quite hot and it can either tear off, and hopefully tear off free, and get out of there without doing anything,” Pouliot continued. “Or, it could chop into the good engine on the left […] or it could chop into the fuselage, which means your controls to the rear are all taken care of.”

In this case, the phrase “all taken care of” – in the words of a seasoned civilian flyer and longtime military aviator – means the controls would be completely wiped out, and the plane would spin out of control and crash. The Flight 293 Richard Pouliot was aboard had to get down and land as quickly as possible before that happened.

With no controls “you kind of fly like a rock,” Pouliot said. With this imminent threat from the runaway propeller – spinning out of control and getting dangerously hot – the pilot of the Flight 293 of October 1962 took fast action.

The plane “immediately started to descend, to get right down close to the water. I’d say maybe 500 feet, something like that,” Pouliot continued.

Aiming for a Safe Place to Land

At this point, the plane was north of Annette Island, where the other Flight 293 would later come down, and reaching the nearest airport would require flying over mountains. The decision was made by the pilots to fly only over water in order to reach Sitka, which had seaplane facilities but no runway, or Gustavus, which did have a runway.

The pilots had radioed for help as soon as the problem emerged, and the steward and two stewardesses, that’s what flight attendants were called in those days, prepped the passengers for a water landing. They gave everyone inflatable “Mae West” life vests, and told them how to brace for impact. They moved passengers out of the danger zone where the propeller might tear through the cabin. This meant that Richard Pouliot, sitting near the back of the plane, had another passenger sitting on the floor between his feet.

For the next 45 minutes or so, the Northwest Airlines DC-7C headed north over the water, aiming for Sitka or Gustavus.

They didn’t make it to either.

“The prop never did tear off, but the engine just completely burst into flames,” Pouliot said. “And the movement through the air brings those flames back over the wing, and the wing is where the fuel tanks are.”

“As soon as we caught fire,” Pouliot continued, “we were down there close enough to the water that [the pilot] just pulled the throttles back, I think made about a 45-degree turn to the left, and set it down.”

One Heck of a Big Jolt

The landing consisted of two thumps: initial contact with the choppy water, and then one more less intense impact.

“We did have one heck of a big jolt,” Pouliot said. “And then the airplane actually bounced and we had a second big jolt and then came to a stop.”

Remarkably, within about five minutes, even as water began filling the cabin, the passengers and crew all evacuated and climbed into five inflatable life rafts. Not long after that, they had transferred first to a small radio navigation maintenance boat operated by the FAA, and then to a Coast Guard cutter.

While similar in so many ways to the Flight 293 that disappeared in June 1963, everyone aboard this Flight 293 survived.

On Episode Five of Unsolved Histories: What Happened to Flight 293?, we examine the amazing story of survival of the passengers and crew of the other Flight 293, and glean what we can from that near-disaster to understand what happened when the other flight went down.

The pilot at the controls of Flight 293 had thousands of hours of experience stretching back to the 1930s. Captain Albert Olsen was a veteran employee of Northwest Airlines, who had served as chief pilot, and who had devoted years of his career developing important safety innovations which benefited the entire industry.

Retired flight attendant Darlene Jevne flew with Captain Olsen on several occasions.

“He was strong on safety,” Jevne said. “We respected him. People liked flying with him. Crews [would] always say, ‘We’ve got him on board. Great.’”

End of The Prop Age

Aviation was changing in 1963. Prop planes – and the prop-plane work schedules with generous stretches of time off that Captain Olsen loved – were being replaced with jetliners and more rigorous Jet Age work schedules. Olsen’s son Fred says his father was ready to retire, so he could spend more time playing golf and pursuing new business opportunities in Southern California.

“Flying the old piston planes you could get all your hours in a week and a half, like flying to Tokyo, then to Taipei, then to Taiwan, and then to Korea, and then back to Tokyo, and maybe someplace else and back and then back to Seattle,” Fred Olsen said. “You could have a month to six [or] seven weeks off between the next time you have to go to work. That was the time he could play golf in Palm Desert and go to his house on a golf course.”

Olsen’s children were each profoundly affected by the loss of their father, and each copes in their own personal way. Daughter Carolyn Olsen Bishop stayed close to home and helped her mother, while launching her own career as a school teacher and raising a family.

Fred Olsen chose another path, rarely looking back, and rarely returning to the Pacific Northwest as he lived in Tokyo and became a world renowned ceramics artist.

But Fred shared a bond with his late father through aviation, forged when Fred was a child, accompanying Albert Olsen to the scene of Northwest Airlines crashes.

“I can still see the plane all twisted and everything and how it hit houses in the trees and the street,” Fred Olsen said, recalling one particular crash from the 1950s in Minnesota. “I can remember that. I must have been, what, 13 years old?”

Fred never trained as a pilot, but he worked briefly at a small airport in Southern California as a teenager, often taxiing aircraft around the tarmac using knowledge gleaned from his father.

Flying home from Japan after he got word that Flight 293 had gone down, Fred queried the crew of the Northwest Airlines jet that carried him to Seattle about what had happened.

“I wanted to know what happened to the flight,” Fred said. “Most of the pilots know, because it gets around, scuttlebutt gets around.”

Friendly Fire?

The theory shared in the cockpit that day, Fred said, was that a missile, accidentally fired by an American fighter pilot, had brought down the DC-7C.

Irene Johnson’s husband was Don Schaap was a member of the cabin crew of Flight 293. She says the man who in 1968 bought the house she had shared with her late husband told her he worked for the FAA in Seattle, and that he had seen a report attributing the loss to a missile. Research confirms that the man did, in fact, work for the FAA, but he has since passed away.

Retired flight attendant Darlene Jevne said she heard similar stories about Flight 293.

“The scuttlebutt has always been . . . ‘You know, it just doesn’t vanish,’” Jevne said. “They called and wanted to change altitude . . . and they dived straight in. That doesn’t really happen.”

Fred Olsen and his sister Carolyn Bishop Olsen have wondered for 60 years about what happened to their father and why the DC-7C went down. Each worried that somehow the crash was his fault.

“I still like my missile theory,” Fred said. “It takes the blame away from my dad.”

On Episode 4 of Unsolved Histories: What Happened to Flight 293?, we meet Fred Olsen and Carolyn Bishop Olsen, and try to sort fact from fiction in the scuttlebutt that spread after the plane went down.

Susan Francis was 16-years-old and going to high school in El Paso, Texas in the spring of 1963. She and Jody Whipkey had been best friends since middle school, and were making the most of their sophomore year.

It was a golden age to be a teen in America.

“We were crazy kids. We flirted with boys, and we loved theater and drama and dance. We were in dance classes together,” Francis said. “We loved dogs. We bought each other crazy things.”

“She was sparkly and she had a sense of humor, she laughed,” Francis recalls of her best friend Jody. “My mother loved her, because you always laughed when you talked to Jody – she said cute, funny things.”

Moving To Alaska

Jody’s father was stationed at the old Biggs Air Force Base in El Paso. Sometime around March 1963, Jody told Susan that her father had been assigned to Elmendorf Air Force Base, and the Whipkey family was moving to Alaska. Jody’s mom considered letting Jody stay behind in El Paso with Susan, but once school was out at the end of May, Jody departed Texas with her mother, father and older sister. They headed north to McChord to connect with Flight 293.

A few days later, Susan Francis found out about the crash from her mom, who’d read about it in the El Paso newspaper. Susan was devastated.

Before the crash, Susan began having a series of vivid dreams about Jody and her family – picturing them waiting to board the plane, then sitting on the plane, and then buckling their seatbelts as the DC-7C hit turbulence. Then, around the time of the crash, Susan is convinced she saw Jody in her neighborhood, walking toward her in the distance, only to disappear a few blocks away.

Susan claims to be a confirmed skeptic who needs evidence in order to believe something is true. But she also said that something inexplicable was happening in June 1963.

“I felt like Jody tried to say goodbye to me,” Francis said. “Whether I made that up in my brain, or whether there’s some remote way through, I don’t know, mitochondrial DNA or something like that, she tried to connect with me.”

Over the decades, Susan Francis left El Paso and moved to California. But she never forgot her best friend. “I graduated. I got married. I had a baby. I mean, life goes on,” she said. “But Jody has always stayed with me.”

Creating a Community

Susan Francis and Greg Barrowman, who we met in Episode One, each lost someone they love on Flight 293. After sharing their experiences in an emotional phone call, the two decided to organize and to seek out others with connections to Flight 293 and to create a group devoted to commemorating the tragedy.

One of the first people they found is Don Bennett, who was just a young child in Louisiana when his father Austin “Dallie” Bennett died on Flight 293.

One day, Don joined Greg and Susan on a conference call on which Don shared distinct memories of his father, and was overcome with emotion.

“I’ll probably cry when I get off the phone, just knowing that I’m talking with somebody that had family or friends on that plane,” Bennett told them. “They might have been sitting next to my dad.”

“What went through my dad’s mind when that plane was going down?” Don asked Greg and Susan. “What went through my dad’s mind knowing that he has five children he ain’t never gonna get to see again?”

Losing a Sister, Niece and Nephew

Connie Miller of Gresham, Oregon lost her younger sister Jewell Smith on Flight 293. She also lost Jewell’s two young children, who were Connie’s two-and-a-half-year-old nephew and six-week old niece.

Miller said the tragedy changed her parents immediately. They had driven Jewell and her two kids from Gresham to McChord Air Force Base, so they could join Jewell’s husband in Anchorage.

“My mother and father left as a middle-aged couple up to take their daughter to put her on a plane with their grandchildren,” Miller said. When they returned home, having learned of the plane’s disappearance, the couple were haggard and hunched over, and, she said, “walking up the sidewalk were two old people.”

“It just aged them instantly,” she recalls.

On Episode Three of Unsolved Histories: What Happened to Flight 293?, we explore the love between friends – and between siblings, parents and children – and how it endures despite tragedy. And we learn how shared tragedy can unite strangers to create a powerful antidote to grief and loss, and to give hope to an otherwise lost cause.

When an 8-year old boy named Greg Barrowman waved goodbye to his teenage brother Bruce at an airfield one June morning, that little boy had no idea that the events which would transpire on that fateful day would profoundly affect him and his family – and dozens of other families around the United States – for the next six decades.

“He was dressed in his uniform and ready to go,” Greg said, describing the moment U.S. Army Private Bruce Barrowman, who had just finished basic training, stepped out of the family car and onto the sidewalk near the passenger terminal. “[It was] kind of a proud moment.”

Greg explains his was a strict family, not given to public displays of emotion.

“We had one of those good ‘adult’ kind of goodbyes, where we all got out and stood face to face with a handshake and hugs,” Greg said. “We were a little more disciplined, I think, where you were little men and women, instead of a bunch of goofy kids.”

That morning, Bruce, along 100 other men, women and children, boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 293, a Military Air Transport Service (MATS) charter flight between McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma, Washington and Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska.

The Douglas DC-7C

The aircraft was a Douglas DC-7C, one of the last propeller airliners designed and built before the age of jet travel. Most of the passengers were active duty members of the military, like Bruce, but there were also spouses and dependent children, and a handful of civilian government employees. The crew of six were skilled and experienced civilian employees of Northwest Airlines. Ahead lay what was expected to be a routine flight lasting roughly six hours, ferrying people to military postings and federal jobs in Alaska during the Cold War.

But Flight 293 never arrived at Elmendorf Air Force Base. With no warning and no distress call, the DC-7C crashed into the ocean west of the Dixon Entrance in the Gulf of Alaska. There were no survivors, and no bodies were ever recovered. Among those lost on Flight 293 were individuals traveling alone, but also entire families traveling together.

Greg was devastated by the loss of his big brother Bruce.

After the crash, things would never be the same for Greg’s parents, or for Greg and his remaining three siblings. The disappearance of Flight 293 broke his family apart.

“I think my sister put it best,” Greg says. “There was no rudder on the ship [of our family] anymore.”

Military Gives Up Searching

Greg’s family, and every other family of those left behind, never got any answers about why the DC-7C crashed, and the military gave up searching for the plane just days after it crashed.

Investigations by the federal government into the cause of the crash were inconclusive, and if the military ever tried to figure out what had happened to Flight 293, any record of that has been lost. And somehow, maybe because Flight 293 was a military charter of a civilian aircraft, the entire tragedy has been virtually forgotten by the Army and the Air Force. Perhaps most tragically, many of the families left behind feel like they have been forgotten, too.

On the first episode of Unsolved Histories: What Happened to Flight 293?, meet Greg Barrowman and learn what it was like to live through the aftermath of the tragedy – to understand the loss and the grief, and to never give up searching for answers and for closure.

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, 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 says a Canadian Air Force plane was first to spot debris west of Annette Island, and so the Klamath headed in that direction. A Japanese merchant ship was first on the scene and had 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, 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-thousand foot depth at the crash site was too deep for the technology available at the time.

A New Search?

Six decades later, finding the plane now still won’t be easy, and any kind of search will be expensive, and requiring the resources of a well-funded private group or the U.S. Navy. Various private underwater archaeology groups operating around the world in the 21^st century tend to search only for well-known targets, such as 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, but he’s also a volunteer researcher, diver and president of the not-for-profit Maritime Archaeological Society. Williams was part of the group who 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 a minimum of tens of millions of dollars. And, like the recent search for the Boeing 777 Malaysian airliner MH-370 that disappeared in 2014, spending all that money still might not turn up anything.

“As those bits and pieces settle down through 8-thousand 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.”

On Episode Two of Unsolved Histories: What Happened to Flight 293?, meet Scott Williams and other experts and aviation historians to find out exactly what a search would entail, and what finding the DC-7C might reveal about why it went down.