Northwest Orient Flight 2501

Shortly after midnight on June 24, 1950, a Northwest Orient Airlines plane flying west over Lake Michigan radioed a routine request to air traffic controllers. The pilot asked for permission to descend from 3,500 feet to 2,500 feet.

The request was denied because of other air traffic in the area.

That was the last anyone ever heard from Flight 2501.

The plane, carrying fifty-eight people, disappeared somewhere over the dark waters of Lake Michigan, about eighteen miles off the coast of Michigan. At the time, it was the deadliest commercial airline accident in American history. More than seventy years later, the main wreckage of the plane has never been found.

The Flight

Flight 2501 was a Douglas DC-4, a four-engine propeller airliner, one of the workhorses of postwar commercial aviation. It took off from LaGuardia Airport in New York City on the evening of June 23, 1950, bound for Seattle, with a stop in Minneapolis.

On board were fifty-five passengers and three crew members: Captain Robert Lind, First Officer Verne Wolfe and Flight Attendant Bonnie Ann Feldman. The passengers included businesspeople, families with young children, honeymooners and people going on vacation.

The flight crossed the Great Lakes region in the dark. As it approached Lake Michigan, it flew into a line of severe thunderstorms, with lightning, heavy rain and strong winds.

The Storm

Investigators believe that the plane was flying into or near the storm line when it went down. The weather that night was violent. Pilots of other planes in the area reported severe turbulence and lightning.

The DC-4 was not equipped with weather radar, which didn’t exist on commercial planes in 1950. The pilots would have had little idea what lay ahead of them in the darkness except what they could see through the windshield in flashes of lightning.

At 11:51 p.m. Eastern time, Captain Lind radioed his position and asked to descend. The request was denied. After that, there was nothing.

The Search

When Flight 2501 failed to report in, a massive search began. Coast Guard ships and planes, along with Navy vessels and fishing boats, scoured the southern part of Lake Michigan.

By the following morning, searchers began finding debris floating on the surface of the lake, about eighteen miles northwest of Benton Harbor, Michigan: pieces of upholstery, seat cushions, blankets, papers, life vests, luggage, and other small items. And they found human remains — not whole bodies, but small pieces of human tissue.

Over the following days, more debris washed up on beaches along the Michigan shore. A slick of oil and fuel was found on the surface of the lake.

But the main body of the plane — the fuselage, the wings, the engines — was never located. The lake was deep, its bottom soft and muddy. Sonar equipment at the time wasn’t good enough to find it.

The Investigation

The Civil Aeronautics Board, which investigated plane crashes in those days, was never able to determine the cause of the accident. Without the wreckage, there was no way to know whether the plane had been hit by lightning, broken up in turbulence, suffered a mechanical failure, or simply flown into the water while trying to get out of the storm.

The board’s final report said that there was insufficient evidence to determine the probable cause.

The Victims

Because so few remains were recovered, many of the victims could never be identified. Their families were left without bodies to bury. Some of the human remains that were recovered were buried together in a mass grave in two cemeteries in Michigan, in St. Joseph and Benton Harbor, with no names on them.

For decades, there was no memorial to the fifty-eight people who died. Their families mourned privately.

The Search Goes On

In 2004, a nonprofit organization called the Michigan Shipwreck Research Association, led by researcher Valerie van Heest, began a long-term effort to find the wreckage of Flight 2501. Working with the author Clive Cussler, who funded underwater searches through his foundation, they used modern sonar to search large stretches of the lake bottom.

Over the years, they found many other shipwrecks and lost aircraft in Lake Michigan. They haven’t found Flight 2501.

But they did something else. They tracked down the families of the victims, many of whom had never been in contact with each other. They collected the stories and photographs of the people who died. And in 2008, they held a memorial service for the families and helped create a memorial marker at the site of the mass grave in St. Joseph.

The Lake Michigan Triangle

Flight 2501 has become part of a modern legend known as the “Lake Michigan Triangle,” an area of the lake where some people claim that ships and planes have disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Like the Bermuda Triangle, the idea has more to do with storytelling than science. Lake Michigan is a vast and dangerous body of water, subject to sudden, violent storms, and it has claimed thousands of ships over the centuries.

But the loss of Flight 2501 was real, and fifty-eight families were left with an unanswered question that has lasted for generations.