By Jason George
Chicago Tribune
May 25, 2006
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SOUTH HAVEN, Mich. -- When search crews cast off from Chicago shores 56 years ago to find a Northwest Airlines DC-4 that had seemingly vanished over Lake Michigan, they believed it would be a rescue mission.

No one could have imagined that the lake would keep the fate and location of Flight 2501 a secret for more than half a century.

That's long enough, said underwater archeologists and amateur historians who have spent the last month trying to locate the airplane. At the time, the crash was the deadliest American commercial airline disaster in history.

On Wednesday, the team finished hunting with high-tech equipment. And divers hope to go back this weekend and examine spots that sonar and a magnetometer indicated as possible wreckage.

"It seems like it's certainly findable," said Ralph Wilbanks of Younges Island, S.C., whose team is being financed by Clive Cussler, the author of underwater adventure fiction that has sold more than 100 million copies.

"It's just a mystery what happened to this plane."

This much is known: At 7:30 p.m. on June 23, 1950, 55 passengers and a crew of three took off from New York's LaGuardia Airport toward Seattle. The flight was uneventful as it made its way toward its first scheduled stopover in Minneapolis. But then, Capt. Robert Lind requested a lower altitude, from 3,500 feet to 2,500 feet when flying in the vicinity of Benton Harbor, Mich., presumably because of worsening area storms.

That request, which was denied because of other air traffic at that altitude, was the last communication from Flight 2501.

Within 30 minutes, airline officials realized the plane had not passed over Milwaukee, as planned, and a search was launched. Chicago Air Route Traffic Control soon mustered an impressive response--mobilizing not only the Air Force, Coast Guard and the Navy but police in every state that borders Lake Michigan.

Many, unfortunately, headed toward Milwaukee because of reports of what turned out to be an unrelated oil slick and flash in the sky.

It's doubtful though the squads could have saved anyone, even if they had gone directly to where most of the scant debris was eventually recovered, about 18 miles northwest of Benton Harbor.

A fuel tank float, blankets, shredded arm rests and small wooden pieces were about all that was recovered from a plane that flight records indicate weighed 71,342 pounds upon takeoff.

Horrific discoveries of body parts followed along Lake Michigan beaches for the next several days, but the search was called off within a week without the plane, or a complete body, ever being found. A two-day public hearing in Chicago the next month and another one months later failed to determine the cause of the crash or its exact location. There was no "black box."

"It is known that the flight entered an area where there was severe turbulence and that it crashed shortly afterward," read the government's final report.

"This fact in itself indicates that the accident probably resulted from either a structural failure caused by the turbulence, or because control of the airplane was lost. However, there is no evidence upon which a determination can be made as to which of these two possibilities actually caused the accident."

Just the same, by the time both inquiries had begun, America had already turned its eyes elsewhere: One day after the crash, the United States entered the Korean conflict.

The crash would make little news again until 2004, when Cussler read an article by a member of the Michigan Shipwreck Research Associates, a non-for-profit group whose mission is to "Preserve Michigan's submerged maritime history."

For 26 years, Cussler's team, headed by Wilbanks, has searched the globe for shipwrecks, most famously finding in 1995 the Hunley, a Confederate submarine buried in sediment off the coast of Charleston, S.C.

Cussler had never searched for a plane before, but he asked the shipwreck group if it would like to combine local knowledge with the expertise of his crew. The group enthusiastically agreed, and the new team went on to do a brief search in 2004 and another last May, which turned up two forgotten boats on the lakebed.

"We're finding everything there is to find, but no airplane," said Valerie Olson VanHeest, shipwreck group director who also co-founded the Underwater Archaeological Society of Chicago in 1988.

The group also located relatives of three people who died in the crash and held a memorial service earlier this month for them.

William Kaufmann's mother died on Flight 2501, and for decades he considered Lake Michigan a "big black graveyard."

The 62-year-old California attorney said that since the service, he's looked at the lake differently. "Going out there helped a lot," he said. "Now it just feels like a regular lake."

But it's a deep regular lake, which has not helped the crew in the search.

"We don't generally look this deep," Wilbanks said, The team is searching in about 200-feet-deep water.

The lake depth is just one factor that has slowed the search.

"If it was a 1,000-foot ship, this would be a lot easier," Wilbanks said. A DC-4 is only 95 feet long. If anything is found, it's likely to be a portion of the plane, like a tail section or one of its four Pratt & Whitney engines, which each weighed nearly 1,600 lbs.

"I'd hate to not find this airplane," Wilbanks said.

He's not giving up hope. He and the others plan to come back next year, too, if 2006 is not their year.

The world might have to wait one more spring, at least, to put to rest one of aviation's most mysterious--and forgotten--tragedies.