I thought of this after seeing the TIL about the concrete arrows pointing early pilots across the continent. I wondered if any of those early airmail flights or others might have gone done in all that wilderness and are still missing.
At least here in Alaska, there are many — even up to the modern era.
Back in 1929, Alaska lost two of its most famous pilots in the span of two months. On Sept. 16, 1929, Russ Merrill disappeared while flying from Anchorage to a mine in Southwestern Alaska.
On Nov. 9, 1929, Carl Ben Eielson and Earl Borland disappeared during a contract flight intended to bring off furs from a Soviet freighter icebound off Siberia. Their crash site wasn't found until Jan. 25, and Merrill's remains have never been found (though a scrap of fabric found by a hunter was matched to Merrill's plane.)
In 1937, one of the most famous Soviet aerial disappearances took place as the "Russian Lindbergh" Sigizmund Levanesvsky and five others disappeared when their modified bomber disappeared during a nonstop flight from Moscow to Fairbanks, Alaska. The remains of that plane have never been found.
The most famous disappearance in Alaska history took place on Oct. 16, 1972 when Alaska Congressman Nick Begich and U.S. House Majority Leader Hale Boggs (a Congressman from Louisiana) disappeared on a flight from Anchorage to Juneau. Despite the largest search and rescue operation in American history to that point, no trace of the aircraft was ever found.
The disappearance of Begich, Boggs and the two others aboard that aircraft led to the passage of legislation mandating that emergency locator beacons be installed aboard all civilian aircraft in the United States. Thanks to that disappearance, it's much harder for a flight to disappear today.