J. Stoltzfus/Courtesy of the National Park Service
On a cold, dark night in January 1952, a distress call went out over Death Valley.
“Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. This is Air Force 001 bailing out north of Barstow, California,” an official crash report would later read. Seconds later, six men jumped out of a 16-ton, two-engine, SA-16 Albatross plane into total darkness. The plane — with its backdoor hanging open — continued unmanned for a few moments, eventually crashing into a nearby desert mountain.
More than 70 years later, the metallic carcass is still there.
“The whole setting for it is just bizarre in a post-apocalyptic way,” said Abby Wines, spokesperson for Death Valley National Park. “It’s kind of on its side on a slope. It’s extremely steep. You’re on the ridge that sticks out into Panamint Valley. When you’re looking through and over the plane, there’s this desolate, open space where there’s nothing but the valley and mountains as far as the eye can see.”
But the site, which can still be accessed by very experienced hikers, is just the start. The real story is why the Air Force was flying over Death Valley in the first place: a fantastical tale that involves the most secret corners of the federal government, classified nighttime training flights and Cold War anti-communist agents.
A jump into darkness
If not for the crash, we would know very little, if anything at all, about the formation of the 580th, 581st and 582nd Air Resupply and Communications Wings, also known as ARC Wings.
The project was a joint effort between the Air Force and the CIA, part of a “super-secret operation few people knew about in 1952,” according to an article titled “The CIA’s Death Valley Albatross,” which ran in Air Classics magazine in April 1979.
“The CIA was just flying over the park,” said Kimberly Selinske, Death Valley historian. “It wasn’t like they were using the park. They just happened to crash.”
When SFGATE first called Selinske about the Albatross, she was only vaguely familiar with it. But as Death Valley’s first official historian, a trip to the archives yielded scattered papers, an article and one official narrative compiled in the 1970s.
“I knew there was a wreck that was vaguely visible from California Highway 190, but I didn’t know anything specific about it,” she told SFGATE in a phone interview. “This was a fun rabbit hole. It was so unique. Being that the CIA partnered with the Air Force in this unit they built, it had some interesting ties to Cold War history.”
Born “within the CIA” during the post-war period of the early 1950s, the group was made up of former World War II pilots and designed to be “capable of penetrating foreign borders for the specific purpose of infiltrating agents and equipment to countries friendly towards the United States but who were under the control of Communist rulers,” as reported in the Air Classics story.
The CIA and the Air Force formed three of these units. Of these three groups, it was the 580th that flew its secretive training missions out of Mountain Home Air Force Base in southwestern Idaho, down to San Diego and back. That path — a four-hour, 1,400-mile round trip — goes directly over Death Valley, then a 19-year-old national monument.
“They were doing a practice run, kind of a navigation thing to get used to flying at night,” Selinske said. “To my understanding, this was a standard practice run. It wasn’t, as far as I know, the first time they had done it. Their route was flying from Mountain Home down to San Diego and back to the base before sunrise.”
The first sign of trouble came around 6:30 p.m., when one of the Albatross’ two engines gave out.
“It had a violent blast,” Selinske said. “It was really loud. It woke up the four guys who were sleeping in the back of the plane. Even when they put all the power into engine two, they were not holding at 11,000 feet. They were losing altitude at a rate of 500 feet per minute. They could’ve crashed into a mountain.”
Death Valley’s tallest mountain is Telescope Peak at 11,049 feet, part of the Panamint Range that runs right through the heart of the park.
“They didn’t want to hit those mountains,” she added.
Source:https://www.sfgate.com/california-parks/article/cia-spy-plane-crash-death-valley-19974450.php