The plane took off on a routine supply run and was due to land ninety minutes later. It never arrived, and the search called off after three weeks turned up nothing — no wreckage, no debris field, no radio signal. For sixty years, the case sat open on a shelf, one of a handful of disappearances a small mountain range had never fully explained.
What changed wasn't a new lead. It was warming. A glacier that had crept forward for most of the 20th century began retreating fast enough that a hiking guide, crossing terrain that had been buried under ice for as long as anyone could remember, noticed a piece of metal that didn't belong to the mountain.
What sixty years of ice had been hiding
Investigators who reopened the file found the wreckage largely intact, preserved rather than destroyed by decades under compacted snow. The flight recorder didn't survive, but the wreckage pattern and a length of cable failure told them almost everything the original search never could: a mechanical fault, not the storm everyone had assumed at the time.
The case is formally closed now, filed alongside a small number of others that modern retreating ice has quietly resolved in the last two decades. Investigators say there are at least a dozen more disappearances in the same range still waiting on the same slow, unplanned kind of evidence to surface.