‘Unsolved Histories’: The wreckage of cold war plane crash

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 21st 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.