Jan 24, 2022: According to an AFP report a missing World War II plane has been identified in India’s remote Himalayas nearly 80 years after it crashed with no survivors, following a search in a treacherous high-altitude area.

The C-46 transport aircraft was carrying 13 people from Kunming in southern China when it disappeared in stormy weather over a mountainous stretch of Arunachal Pradesh in the first week of 1945.

“This aircraft was never heard from again. It simply disappeared,” said Clayton Kuhles, a US adventurer who led the mission after a request from the son of one of those on board the doomed flight. Kuhles was tasked with conducting the search by Bill Scherer, whose officer father was aboard the plane when it crashed.

In the expedition, a team of Kuhles and guides from a local Lisu ethnic group leaders ford rivers deeper than their chests and camped in the freezing temperatures. It was a potentially deadly mission: three Lisu hunters died of hypothermia in the same area in 2018 when they were caught in a non-seasonal blizzard in September, Kuhles said, while two others “barely survived”.

“My Lisu guide and porters were very worried about the location of our high camp,” he added. But the team finally found the plane on a snow-capped mountain peak last month, where they were able to identify the wreckage by tail number.

There were no human remains left in the craft.

Bill Scherer said about the find, “I grew up without a father. All I can think of is my poor mother, getting a telegram and finding out her husband is missing and she is left with me, a 13-month-old baby boy.”

The C-46 was among the hundreds of US military planes went missing around the theatre of operations in India, China and Myanmar during World War II.

On the one hand, many aircraft were brought down by hostile fire from Japanese forces, they did not account for some aircraft losses. Some according to Kuhles are believed to have been brought down by ice damage, hurricane-force winds and other severe weather conditions.

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