The Cold Bay B-17 Crash
Alaska
Out here on the windswept Alaska Peninsula lies the wreck of a B-seventeen Flying Fortress, the famous four engine bomber of the Second World War. This one did not fall in combat. It crashed near Cold Bay after the war had ended, going down shortly after takeoff.
Its crew was lost. Cold Bay was a major military airfield during the war, a refueling and staging point on the long, foggy chain of the Aleutians, where storms roll in fast and visibility can vanish in minutes. By then the great fleets were gone, but aircraft still moved through this remote outpost.
The wreckage has rested on the tundra ever since, a quiet marker to a crew lost in peacetime, in some of the harshest flying conditions in North America.
