In 1950, a U.S. troop plane vanished without a trace in the Yukon
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A) it's big, but in a lake it varnishes easy.
B) lake isn't forest. In winter, it makes an obvious landing option when things go wrong.
C) chances are it crashed, not landed. Perhaps a fire weakened the ice, hot engines etc. If it landed one would expect radios to work.
D) it hasn't been found since (but others have), so I eould suggest it's "not easy to see".
The Yukon is big, and population is sparse, so its possibly on land, but speaking as a golfer, if there's water around, it's likely in it.
Depending on how dense the forest is and the foliage coverage you likely couldn’t spot it from the air.
Reminds me of search planes during WW2. They go out on search patterns over the Pacific and even with nothing but water, it was easy to miss an aircraft carrier unless you were relatively close (within 10 nautical miles).
And the search area(s) is/are reasonably well known now - it was flying to Milford Sound, there were several mountain passes feasible for flying over the Main Divide in a rather underpowered aircraft to get there, and there were some statements from locals in the high country in the east who believe they heard the plane as it flew into the mountains that yielded places to look.
There's a general agreement forming about which area it crashed, but no evidence yet. Makes for good practice in extreme terrain for LandSAR exercises though.
So yeah, far smaller search area, still missing. Google ZK-AFB for more, there's a few books on it, one gent in particular has been searching most of his adult life for it.
Planes can be next to impossible to spot, even when they are next to a motorway.
It did not say all reported crashes other than this one were linked to crash sites.
The plane has to be there, no aliens would need it.
The above is the Google Earth view of the area. Interestingly you can still see the (former) airstrips from the satellite view; just south of the point at Snag and slightly north of Aishihik; they were part of the Northwest Staging route.
Since the plane radio'ed in at Snag but failed to check in at Aishihik, in theory it would have crashed somewhere between those two points. The biggest lake between those points is Wellesley Lake, depth 65 feet. Might also be on land, anyone good at Where's Waldo?
Wrong. The Earth is unmeasurably huge compared to any human-made technology (and that includes radars, cities, etc.), and that's just the surface of the planet. Add the third dimension (and much more difficult to scan, no less) of the oceans and air, and you'd wonder how the heck we can still find our way on flights. It's a fragile tech, and when it crashes (literally), it's almost impossible for us to find where it happened.
A multi million dollar piece of equipment that continuously talks to space can go still go poof, with 200+ people onboard.
Most of the value of land is derived from how close it is to the rest of civilization.
Why would it? Lots of empty land in faraway places. You can buy an acre of land in the desert in Nevada for like $500. Of course nobody wants to be there, that's why it's cheap.
Even the west is pastureland, and then you get to mountains, and, well, yeah.
We're just really advanced pond scum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_the_United_St...
Our species has made some rather accurate calculations of Earth. Far from „unmeasurable”.
Well, this was unexpected. On the one hand, Yukon is larger than the surface of Germany. On the other hand, were there 500 plane crashes in Germany, excluding wars? Turns out far from it: almost 10x less with 62 fatal crashes since 1945: https://www.statista.com/statistics/262867/fatal-civil-airli...
Now maybe not all the 500 plane wrecks were fatal but still that's a disturbing likelihood of a crash. With Germany having some 100x-1000x more intense traffic than Yukon, that's easy 1000-10'000x times more likely to crash in the Canadian wilderness. I think I'll pass visiting that in a plane :)
You would get a bunch of dots on a plane with a lot of noise.
Edit: reworded.
"We encountered dry air, but otherwise, all is well."
Even today, there are twice as many moose as people in the Yukon.
We would go on 10 canoe trips and not only not see other people, but not see evidence of people - no "campsites", no roads, no power lines, nothing. And that wasn't even remote by Yukon standards at all.