The Disappearance of Northwest Flight 2501 | Expedition Unknown

I’m investigating the case of America’s vanished airliner,
Northwest Flight 2501, which disappeared over Lake Michigan in 1950 and has never been found.
To learn about the fateful trip, I’m taking an exclusive flight on one of the last operating DC-4s on earth, expertly flown by pilots Dave Shirtlef and Tim Chop.

First observation now that I’m up here:
This instrumentation pretty much looks like what it looked like in 1950.
Yes, it does. We don’t have a big screen to tell us exactly where we’re at all the time.
We still use a navigation chart.
Right, and Northwest 2501—when these guys are navigating across the country—
they’re not being tracked in real time by radar.

[Music]
Unlike today, where planes are tracked using a network of ground radar stations,
in 1950 civil aircraft would have to manually check in with airport towers as they traveled
and receive instructions as they progressed.
Air traffic control was primarily done with blackboards and people who were very good at math.
They would take the pilot’s reports and then estimate where everyone would be,
then do it all over again when the next reports came in.

In the case of 2501, they left LaGuardia,
flying west—just flying west.
They departed at 7:31.
A beautiful summer evening, like this.
55 passengers and a crew of three.
A crew of three, so there would have been a pilot, co-pilot, and a flight attendant.
Right?
Correct.

The initial lake was very comfortable.
They were having no issues at all.
Cruising at six thousand feet, the first few hours of the flight passed uneventfully.
Being a night flight, many of the passengers no doubt tried to sleep during the trip to Minneapolis.

At 10:20 p.m., Flight 2501 crosses into Ohio.
Two and a half hours after departing LaGuardia, they reported in near Cleveland, requesting an altitude change to 4,000.
Descending to 4,000. This is an unpressurized airplane, so you can’t go too high.

Today we cruise at high altitudes in pressurized airplane cabins, which allow us to travel safely without oxygen masks.
Flight 2501, like all commercial flights of the time, was unpressurized, so they generally had to fly under 10,000 feet.
There’s a reason, though, that we don’t want to fly today below 10,000 feet.
Right—all of your weather turbulence is down at those levels.
Right, exactly. So they probably wanted to descend to just get underneath whatever clouds were already there.
Yes, that would be one reason to go down.

30 minutes later, they were requested by air traffic control to descend to 3,500 feet.
President confronted traffic with another plane that was eastbound, who had just come out of that same weather.
So at that point, they may have had an idea that they were headed toward a storm system.
Yeah, they had confirmation that the restaurants were there.

Though the pilots knew about a storm, they had no idea how bad it really was.
Northwest 2501, copy, descend 500 feet.

At a weather station at Manitowoc, Wisconsin,
meteorologists recorded a 115-millibar drop in air pressure and wind gusts of 71 miles an hour as the squall rolled through.
Flight 2501, unaware of the storm’s intensity, would be flying directly into it.

Continuing west, the pilots check in with the control tower at Battle Creek, Michigan, as scheduled.
Northwest 2501, Battle Creek, estimating Milwaukee 23:37.

What’s the last radio call we know of from Flight 2501?
After Battle Creek, 12:13, they requested to continue their descent to 2,500 feet, most likely due to turbulence.
Make sure everyone’s seatbelt is fastened.

As they approach Lake Michigan, the wind kicks up, and at only 3,500 feet, they feel every gust.
“Stroll Northwest 2501, request permission to descend to 2,500 feet. Do you copy this?”
And why is that? Due to another airplane in the area, and at that point, does the pilot say where he is?
Yes, he did. He reported that he was in the vicinity of Benton Harbor, Michigan.

2501 was flying on a kind of highway in the sky called an airway.
This one was Red 57.
On that route, they were supposed to cross the lake over the town of Glenn.
Yet the pilot claimed he was near Benton Harbor, almost 50 miles to the south.
Assuming his position was correct, why did 2501 go off course?
It’s a mystery that has never been fully explained.

And then what do we hear from them after that? Anything?
Nothing after that. That’s it. That’s it.

At 12:15 a.m. on June 24th, 1950,
Flight 2501 flies into the heart of a massive storm and disappears.

[Music]
Her fate isn’t a mystery for long, though, as grim clues begin to wash ashore.
At the time, it was the worst air disaster in American history.

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With only six of these planes still flying in the world, I don’t know that I’m going to get another opportunity to ask this question.
You fly a DC-4. What do you think happened to that flight?
Well, I think he got over the lake into a very severe thunderstorm of extreme turbulence,
and either had structural failure or he just encountered a downdraft situation that he couldn’t overcome and ended up in the lake.
You literally mean winds pushing down on the plane, and they’re too low to recover out of that?
That is correct.
Wow, and it is possible to have turbulence bad enough to break this plane apart?
It is, yes.
Wow.

Sitting in one of the few DC-4s left in the air,
this is perhaps the closest I’ll ever get to being in the shoes of the passengers aboard 2501.
It’s a terrifying thought to imagine this plane flying in a storm, and even worse to imagine what came next.
But thankfully, on today’s flight, Tim and Dave are navigating in calmer weather.

Well, listen, I really appreciate you guys having me up here. Thank you.
Josh, we’re delighted that you would be on board with us.

Okay, let’s get ourselves back to the airport here.
Tim brings the plane around and begins the landing procedure.
It’s every bit as detailed as the one he used for takeoff.
“100 down, 700, 98.”
“Down at 700, 95. Give me the final idle, idol, 85 down, 780. Stick.”

[Music]
When the plane safely touches down, I realize how much I take modern air safety for granted.
In the 1950s on a DC-4, you never had the luxury of forgetting the dangers of flying.

I need a drink. Come on.
I’ve flown in Northwest 2501’s doppelganger.
Now it’s time to go find the original.