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Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 2501 Cannot Be Found Over Lake Michigan

..but the year is 1950. some debris and body parts were found - and thats all of the 58 people on board that was ever found.
Alerie van Heest and a dedicated group of volunteers have spent a decade searching for the sunken fuselage and engines of the DC-4.
"It became an effort to provide closure to those families still waiting after more than six decades."


Van Heest published a book, "Fatal Crossing," last year about the crash and the quest to find the plane

http://www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_2...-plane-vanished

Local news channel`s features this last week. Another tragedy never solved.

actually it was solved when they found some wreckage and body parts ..... but the Korean war replaced those headlines the next day or so ...and this plane was forgotten by all except the families, friends and perhaps a few others

I can understand a guy committing suicide. I don't get how he can take 230+ with him.

That's just one theory, nothing more. I don't think we'll ever know.

But, .... something happened. I real sure of it now.

If it crashed, they need to at least find something. Disappearing without a trace (no bodies, or wreckage) is tough for the families. The search for closure would be a difficult one.

I'm not saying that I discount the fire theory. I just discount how it is presented by the Wired article. It's not nearly as obvious or simple as the writer implies. But a fire itself, or some other event that causes quick incapacitation is much easier for me to stomach than other theories I've endured. Conspiracy I discount completely for a number of reasons. Murder/suicide only works if the surviving occupant of the flight deck became incapacitated before he finished what he started. A fire that takes out both avionics and fight control wiring yet somehow extinguishes before the plane is destroyed completely STILL YET after all occupants have succumbed COULD leave the plane as a stable uncontrolled lawn dart. I hope against all my own intuition that somehow this scenario is discovered to be true. Suicide is just too awful to contemplate.

I don't disagree with you-

No one knows. If they knew, they'd either have a plane intact on the ground or a wreckage somewhere. The fire theory is put forth by one person while there are many others pointing out many other possibilities, and any one of them could possibly work.

My point was to illustrate that a suicide pact might have to be formed well in advanced until the pilot's rotation paired up, and I leave that up to others to think about whether that sounds plausible.

I know someone who is in his 80s now.

He retired in the 90's after 26 years as an Airline Captain and he received a lot of retirement money making him a multi-millionaire.

He used to fly the best 747 routes from the U.S. to Europe and Asia.

On a side note:

I am not familiar with Courtney Love.

I heard of her name but I don't know what she has done.

http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20797871,00.html

Doesn't pay like it used to, that's for sure. The 747 routes in the 70's paid really well. Not so much for long route pilots any more. A friend of mine was a 777 captain (now flying 737 Pacific routes) and was pretty much struggling like all my other friends with a wife and 2 kids. They were renting when I met them. Wouldn't have even met them if times were like they were in the 70's. They'd be in a totally different neighborhood.

They had a much better idea where to look for the Titannic, and look how long it took to find that. And it was just in two giant pieces. Sad to say, but if this one landed or crashed in the Indian Ocean...we may never find her.

I don�t know, this is the 21st century, large, searched for things don�t go simply missing anymore..

If a plane breaks up on impact, some floating debris will be found somewhere and with ocean current modeling in combination with other data you should be able to find a rough estimate where to look. The only way to really make it likely to disapear would be to have an unobserved coursechange over the ocean and ditch it intact without anyone opening doors (no emergency slides, life-wests etc...)

If it was in controled flight over the ocean, it more then likely had a destination and more then likely will have reached that. I wonder if they include the glide-ratio into the search, I think a 777 should get at least a glideratio of 20:1 and with max altitude that may have been enough to reach something like jemen, oman or somalia where you might be able to not get discoverd imiately..





and the antena-infrastucture is aimed at the ground, reception up is marginal.. it works sometimes but not reliably. It would also depend on whether the pax would realize something was wrong at what time and if it really was malignous acting, they could have been dead. From poising the onboard food to simply using cabin pressure, there is not really a built in safety against a hostile crew or crewmembers.

http://nypost.com/2014/03/19/residents-on-remote-island-we-saw-missing-plane/

Residents of a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean say they saw a �low-flying jumbo jet�� four hours after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished from radar for the last time, according to a report Tuesday.

The residents live on the remote island of Kudahuvadhoo in Maldives � which has an international runway that was among five the plane�s pilot had used for practice on his home flight simulator, according to Malaysian daily newspaper Berita Harian.

Kudahuvadhoo residents told the paper that the massive plane they saw rumbling above them at around 6:20 a.m. on March8 had Malaysia Airlines� trademark white body and red stripes.

The strangest thing is what they would conclude if they saw for instance my flight simulator habits...

"sometimes he just get bored and crashes"

What is this stuff showing up infrequently on british
news sites saying the pilot's wife and kids moved out
of their house the day before the flight? I tried googling
it and all I get are repetitions of the same phrase,
word for word. Can't figure out where it originated,
and don't see any further elucidation, except a couple
of reader comments which add "and their whereabouts are
now unknown" or equivalents. Seems a pretty outrageous
comment to make without any further details. I'm inclined
to suspect sordid tabloid misrepresentation, but I can't
even determine that.

Re the Maldives island, there is a large airstrip on one
of the islands about 100km north of there, I wonder if
they just saw a regular flight in a non-standard holding
pattern for the single runway strip. I presume the airline
wizards here can quickly determine what the local traffic
would be there.

Honestly I am not picking a fight but the fire scenario wasn't posed by one person. It was posed among airline circles immediately. The Swiss Air crash has always been one of the more horrifying lessons to airline pilots. It was only when the reports started to suggest that the plane had been airborne/intact for hours that a fire became far less likely. I want it to have been a fire as awful as that is to write. But I am a tiny bit familiar with the 777. It's no MD-11 and it's no ValueJet DC-9. It has a sophisticated Electical and CB system. I just don't see a way for an electrical fire to sustain and spread enough to completely lawn-dart the plane and cut off crew O2 and comms. And no other type of fire that I can imagine seems capable of doing all that while keeping the plane intact. The early FMC input suggests that they had a hint of a problem and were weighing scenarios in case it got worse. This would not be at odds with the final "good night" transmission. It is perfectly normal to press on when small problems occur. But when they do, you plan a course of action together in case the problem gets worse. However, if that small problem is either smoke they smell or that is reported in the cabin, Swiss Air has taught us all that the problem isn't small and the turn must be soon if not immediate. As I write this it just gets more baffling, not less. Nothing makes sense.

About 10 years ago, an US booster rocket was set to fall in the North Atlantic after a launch. The United Statses government very kindly warned us to keep shipping out of the expected "splash" are on the appropriate day. We replied that we would divert shipping but could not move a 1,000,000 ton ( yes that's a million ton) concrete oil platform in the area and would have to shut down and remove workers at a huge cost. We were not "happy campers". The US response was; "we didn't know it was there"

A million tons of concrete, lit up like a Chistmas tree with a huge gas flare,that had been sitting in the same spot for years and they "didn't know it was there"..........so finding a wee little airplane...........good luck !


This is not a rant aginst the US, just an illustration of the fact that finding stuff is not as easy as it looks on TV or movies.

Investigators this morning reporting they will be attempting to restore deleted files on the pilots home simulation rig he had built. Not sure what they have - people download programs and delete them all the time but who knows.

I agree with PV1, the family angle has been dropped, there has been no followup on that front. What does his wife have to say about it?