After searching the wide body of water with sonar equipment and even receiving assistance from a renowned adventure writer, a team is wrapping up a 20-year hunt for a plane that crashed into Lake Michigan in 1950, killing all 58 people on board.
The deadliest aviation accident in American history occurred when Northwest Orient Flight 2501 crashed.
The Michigan Shipwreck Association’s executive director, Valerie van Heest, expressed conflicted emotions about calling off the 2004 search.
We have done so much to keep the memory of this event and these victims up and center that I feel like we’ve done better for them than if we’d recovered the wreckage, but it’s difficult to have to say because part of me feels like we’ve failed,” van Heest said.
Van Heest stated that after traversing 700 square miles of Lake Michigan, scientists think the plane likely “sunk into the muck” on the bottom after breaking up into fragments too small to be picked up by side-scan sonar.
On June 23, 1950, the propeller-powered DC-4 took off at night from LaGuardia Airport in New York, with two stops scheduled en route to Seattle. Suddenly, a powerful storm hit, and the jet crashed.
In South Haven, Michigan, body parts and debris washed up on the coast.
“We know this plane hit the water with great force, and we know there was no way to survive this,” stated van Heest, author of the book “Fatal Crossing,” which explores the enigma.
Up until 2017, a search was funded by adventure fiction novelist Clive Cussler, whose books have sold millions of copies. Cussler, who passed away in 2020, was also well-known for his own shipwreck hunting and diving adventures.
“I hope someday the families of those lost will have closure,” Cussler wrote in 2018.
