Missing Planes Spawn Legends Small Aircraft Hard To Find In Rugged Terrain
For nearly four decades, Joe Rosenkranz’s missing airplane was a potential treasure with the luster of a sunken Spanish galleon.
People from as far away as the East Coast spent their vacations in and around Idaho, searching for the wealthy businessman’s maroon Stinson. Some figured he and passenger Winstell “Bud” Bolick were hijacked, with plenty of money on board.
Rosenkranz was vice president of Empire Airlines and a farmer when he disappeared along with Bolick in October 1948.
Missing airplanes are made for legends because finding them is tremendously difficult.
Small airplanes often are not found - sometimes for years, sometimes forever. Nearly 100 of the airplanes reported missing since 1983 in the United States still haven’t turned up.
The Cessna 152 that left Spokane’s Felts Field May 28 is a classic case of the vanishing act. Aircraft search experts drew a 270-mile circle around Felts - the range of the airplane with full fuel tanks - and started guessing.
Coeur d’Alene instructor pilot Ed Morrett and student pilot Tim Morgan of Elk, Wash., did not file a flight plan or tell anyone where they were going. Their emergency locator transmitter hasn’t been working. Both of those factors can potentially cause search time to go up dramatically, said Ray Glidden, of the Idaho Division of Aeronautics.
The families of both men, however, remain confident they are alive and will survive.
Swallowed by Idaho’s `primitive area’
Rosenkranz and Bolick were flying from a Moose Creek ranch in the Selway Bitterroot mountains to Lewiston. They took off late in the day, apparently attempting to beat a snowstorm.
Hunters reported hearing an airplane trying to negotiate the Selway River canyon well after dark. Some even reported seeing the plane crash.
The Army Air Corps spent 3-1/2 weeks picking over the “northcentral Idaho primitive area,” with no result, according to a newspaper account. Rosenkranz, meanwhile, was elected to the Idaho Legislature - 11 days after his disappearance.
Two chunks of a Stinson tail section were found by a fisherman along the Selway River in 1958, prompting declarations the airplane was found.
It wasn’t. But details of the find were kept vague to keep treasure-hunters at bay.
Next an airplane wheel washed up at the mouth of Meadow Creek, near the Selway River, during the summer of 1964.
When the airplane finally was discovered in the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness in April 1987, with nothing but bones on board, it was clear two men and a legend had died.
Idaho can account for every small airplane that’s vanished since 1958, except for the one flown by Morrett and Morgan. Still, it would be impossible to tell how many more went down before 1958 and never were found, Glidden said.
Those old aircraft keep turning up. Just a few years ago, wreckage from a 1943 airplane accident was discovered near Deadwood Reservoir in the Boise area, Glidden said. A belt buckle helped identify the wreckage and its occupants.
There are miraculous survival stories, such as two couples who survived in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains for about two weeks after their plane went down in the late 1970s, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
But there are many more situations where nothing is ever known. Montana and Washington are among the many states that track unexplained disappearances.
Water worse than mountains
A pilot left Wenatchee in September 1995, filing a flight plan for a two-hour flight in the area. He never returned. No one has ever found a trace of pilot or plane.
In September 1983, a man and his Cessna 182 vanished when he attempted to return to Kalispell, Mont., 20 minutes after taking off for Billings. His plane, he reported, was having trouble climbing.
The last radar contact had him just 13 miles away. The final report notes, “before takeoff, the pilot was reported looking ill.”
Many missing planes flew off into bad weather, against the advice of the Federal Aviation Administration. An Illinois minister, his mother and two sisters left Felts Field in September 1959 and were last heard from around Mullan, Idaho - when they were advised to turn back.
For the next five years, the minister’s brother searched the Clearwater National Forest. An Orofino-based pilot finally spotted the remains of the small Cessna in 1964, soon after a wheel from Rosenkranz’s plane washed up.
Aviation sleuths figured the minister’s plane hit a rock wall and fell into a spot covered by snow 10 months a year.
Considering the country and those kinds of stories, one might count mountains as the greatest culprit. Not so. It’s water.
In the continental United States, there’s nothing like the Great Lakes for swallowing up small aircraft - led by Lake Michigan. And the lake is skimpy with the clues - an oil slick, a scrap of aluminum, or a tire with a bit of landing gear washing up on shore.
The Atlantic Ocean’s appetite is equally ferocious. Many, many small planes have gone missing trying to fly from Florida to the Bahamas.
If missing planes spawn legends, they also sustain inexhaustible searches, indefatigable vigils. Archeologists and history buffs are still scouring the South Pacific for this country’s most enduring aviation mystery - Amelia Earhart.
Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished between Lae, New Guinea, and Howland Island in July 1937 after flying 22,000 miles of an around-the-world jaunt. Nine Navy ships and 66 airplanes covered the ocean for 16 days. The $4 million search found nothing.
The speculation lives on. Some say Earhart was on a spy mission and captured by the Japanese after her plane went down. Some say she just took up life with a native fisherman.
The ocean, like the rugged American terrain still hiding crashed airplanes, says nothing.
This sidebar appeared with the story: DONATIONS Help wanted Search volunteers and donations to help buy aviation fuel are needed in the search for the two missing pilots. Volunteers should call (208) 666-4066. Donations can be made at Bank of America in Idaho or SeaFirst Bank in Washington.