Hacker News Reader

Comment by brazzy | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't even need to be in a lake. The Yukon is HUGE, covered in forest, and has a bunch of mountains. It's very easy for a plane wreck to be very hard to see in a gorge or among trees. Survey technology was very limited in 1950, and after a few seasons of plant growth, a debris field can become almost invisible from the air. And if it's in rough territory, nobody might ever come near it on the ground, or walk right past it without noticing.

View on HN

Exactly. If it crashed into the forest, you probably wouldn’t be able to see unless you were at ground level and within 30-40 ft of the wreck.

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).

But if you’ve read the article, over 500 other planes have all disappeared in the territory and they’ve all been found. So no matter how vast the forest, is they’ve all been found. There seems to be some anomaly with this one.

I was in AK when a twin engine plane vanished. It was found a year later, it crashed next to a main road.

Planes can be next to impossible to spot, even when they are next to a motorway.

A Mooney was lost in the Rogers Pass along the Trans Canada Highway. A couple years later EMS in a helicopter spotted it some 50 yards off the highway. The local conifer trees are huge.

Alternatively, the technique used for finding plane crashes has a 99% recall and we're just happening to talk about the 1% that slipped through. Survivorship bias is not out of the question here.

I think this needs its own cognitive term, it's not a survivorship or selection bias, it's just skipping the selection entirely and just focusing on the sample. So here people go "This plane is an outlier, there must be something special about it", as opposed to "We would just be talking about another missing plane instead". Or in the immortal words of Tim Minchin "If I didn't have you, someone else would do"

It has survived against being found; that term seems to fit without much torturing of interpretation.

People have been searching for a lost Dragonfly in the South Island of NZ for decades, we're far smaller (and so was the plane, to be fair) than Alaska! It's a 2.5 hours drive from my town by the Pacific Ocean over the Alps to a wild beach on the Tasman Sea. There's a one day running/cycling/kayaking endurance race from the Tasman coast over a pass in the Southern Alps, down to the Pacific coast. (Guess what it's called)

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.

Point of order that I know a Kiwi will understand. Yukon Territory is not in Alaska. It's next door... in Canada. ;-)

Very fair feedback!

The article said 500 wrecks had been found.

It did not say all reported crashes other than this one were linked to crash sites.

Right? Imagine if it’s 500 found out of 1000 known and any number of unknown crash sites that predate the modern flying era. The size of the input data changes the probabilities tremendously.

With some "luck" most debris could be underground.

The plane has to be there, no aliens would need it.

Would be interesting to see the distribution of how long it took till each was found.

And how many were in lakes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com