Lost gold shipment West Africa 1946

You guys responded while I was modifying the other post. So I cut what I changed and pasted it below since it was about storms and missionaries. 

Oh I'm not getting my back in the air over your and Cornelius' comments, GD. Not at all. The comments are good and valid. Educational.

Since there had been rain, thunder, even fog for days prior to and rain & thunder on days after the crash, I'll conjecture / generalize saying it was wide spread. There wasn't much rain the rest of December so it wasn't a season where little fast storms happened every day.
Diaries, questioning local natives who searched 65 years ago for 25? . . . . . missionaries might have taken notes, but with nothing found . . . .

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Hello All

That coffee with lemon juice seems to be working. Either that or the boat load of medicine has kicked in.

In some respects you all have very valid points on the issue. It is what I have being enjoying so much seeing a constructive input on strange puzzling mystery. But ultimately there will be always some degree of speculation.

GD and Cornelius I understand your way of thinking. Concentrating on the perceived evidence to locate the aircraft and not worry about side issues. However as you stated the information collected here is what is already known, well it might of been known to you but I have learned a lot from Sue, Ba and Xavier as well as you and Cornelius.

Some of these side issues may even give some support to your nagging intuition about the aircraft being hijacked by the servicemen etc... knowing about these men and who they were may not find the actual aircraft but at least give a possibility of understanding what happened or events leading up to the crash.

Xavier stated somewhere that they were supposed to contact Cape Palmas? How I understand this is there was no message to the station?

From this we can perhaps conclude two possible scenarios. One the crew of the C-47 flew off with gold and loot to parts unknown? Quite possible. Or the plane met a catastrophic accident where there was zero time to send out a distress call. To me if the second scenario was the case that they had a accident it would indicate either the plane exploded in flight or flew into a mountain.

GD Logical suggestion that the pilot would of decided to fly through the storm is very possible. I used Cornelius logical suggestion to plot a estimated course from Monrovia to Accra and discovered a small mountain range mountain that could of possibly of been in the flight path.?

Having done that with Sue's fantastic discovery of the base weather reports, Which Cornelius rightly comments that the base weather conditions in mind was for area around the airbase only. And Sues later logical suggestion on weather reports from that time of year and days surrounding the accident. Suggest to me the C-47 possibly flew to small mini weather cell over the mountain range near cape Palmas in the south of Liberia.

This is area is part of the intertropical conversion zone where two winds collide and creates precipitation. Cornelius could perhaps confirm this part of the world is prone for tropical storms pop up out of nowhere? Maybe the explosion of the aircraft hitting jungle clad mountain was not heard by natives because of a thunder storm?

A lot of speculation of course but possible. one could also speculate about the natives now just imagine dirt poor Liberian farmers or small scale miners in the south of Liberia and C47 crashes into the jungle. They find 17 bodies in the wreckage and massive amount of gold. Do you not think it would be tempting for them to plunder the wreck and say nothing to the authorities about the crash?

Possible scenarios could be endless of course. And some times speculation can lead to the goods does it not?

Hardluck 

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Hello Xavier

I can only guess of course. I think the rescue party searched the entire length of the flight path for C47 across 3 countries as they had no idea where the plane went down. The problem for them they had such a large area to search sea or land.

It is so easy to crash a plane in a remote or semi remote location and no time at all imposable to find. I can give you an example in Outback N.S.W Australia at a dam called Lake Burrendong, a small Cessna in 1966 with two passengers on it disappeared.

The authorities searched everywhere but the plane did not log a flight plan. It was too large an area to search after a time the search was called off. The Cessna had vanished. It wasn't until over 20 years later when the dam water levels due to a very long period of drought were lower enough to reveal an ghostly outline of a crashed Cessna in the mud.

The irony was the wreck was not far from a boat ramp. And campers, fisherman , canoeist have paddled, swam, fished and boated their way over the remains of 3 crash victims still strapped into their seats for over 20 years without knowing it.

So as you could imagine a crashed C47 in a rain forested mountain range with high rainfall could hide wreckage very easily even today let alone in 1945. And of course for them it was such a large area to search.

Hardluck 

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Sorry to hear about your wife, Xavier. Hope everything works out fine - that's the pits to be so far away. Positive thoughts are sent your way! Sue

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Howdy Y'all,

       I'm back.   Xavier, sorry to hear about your wife.  Hope things turn around quickly.    You and Sue were certainly busy while I was out playing in the field.
        Cornelius and GD, we definitely appreciate the advice and insights the two of you are given...just keep in mind, the "known" information wasn't known to any of the three of us and ALL of the things we're looking for are/were known to someone (including the weather conditions).  And just like we have to look for the little piece of information that seems "odd" and possibly got overlooked, we also are looking through as much known information as possible to see what isn't there (like weather conditions along the route and reports from any other pilots, possibly RAF pilots that might have been flying the same or parallel route within a few hours of our missing flight).
         While it is too early to seriously pursue the conspiracy route until after we've eliminated the natural causes and/or pilot error possibilities----which is where Cornelius wisely seems to be steering us, if we eliminate natural causes and/or the pilot error possibility and we still haven't found a reasonable search area OR if we come across credible accounts of a mystery plane landing and taking off somewhere within the un-refueled range of an aircraft of that specific model aircraft with its specific payload weight and amount of fuel at takeoff ("known" information for that flight which we don't have just like we don't have the weather info), personal information about both the crew (10 people) and passengers (7 people, at least 2 of which look as though they could have known how to fly C-47Bs) could become important.  For instance, from my understanding of what that particular unit did during that time period, this was basically a routine transport mission run a semi-regular schedule that just "happened" to have a shipment of gold and silver in the cargo.  We haven't seen the actual cargo manifest.  Not everyone in the crew is going to know what is in the cargo, especially if I'm right about this being the flying equivalent of a long distance bus run (and knowing that 2 of the passengers were headed to Johannesburg to get married tends to support the idea of it being a "milk run").
         So, I agree Cornelius is correct about what areas we should be concentrating on at this point in our search.  BUT there is no reason why we should not be documenting these other pieces of information as we come across them, just in case we need them later.   After all what information we do have we have because one or the other noticed something that clicked --- otherwise we'd still be looking for records of a crash that happened 6 months after the actual date of the crash.
          Any way, back to trying to find the weather for the specific date and area in question.   It would also be helpful if we could find a copy of the maintenance logs for our plane.   Had the crew reported an engine problems or any problems with major systems in the previous 5-10 flights?   If so, those problems could have recurred or have been aggravated by storms.    The right problems could have caused the plane to be seriously off-course also.   On the other hand if the maintenance log shows only routine maintenance we know we basically have a sound bird that should have been able to handle all but the most severe or sudden weather changes (unless the pilot screwed up).

BA


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