‘Unsolved Histories’: Sorting through the scuttlebutt following the plane crash

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 says, 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.