In June 1950, a four-engine, propeller-driven passenger plane headed from LaGuardia Airport in New York to Minneapolis encountered a violent storm over Lake Michigan and crashed into the turbulent waters below.
“If all aboard are lost, the crash will be the most disastrous in the history of American commercial aviation,” an article on the front page of The New York Times reported the next morning about Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 2501. The search turned up no survivors and no plane, only small pieces of the wreck. All 58 people on board were declared dead.
The few human remains that the Coast Guard skimmed off the lake’s surface were buried in an unmarked mass grave. Newspapers were quickly distracted by the beginning of the Korean War.
Until a team led by local explorers set out in 2004 to find the plane, the mystery of Flight 2501 was little more than fodder for conspiracy theorists.
But more than 20 years later, that search has been called off. While it turned up no physical remains, explorers say, the effort revived the memory of the crash and honored the victims.
On Tuesday, the 75th anniversary of the discovery of the crash, Valerie van Heest, a local maritime history enthusiast who helped revive the search, told surviving family members of the victims that, after scanning the last of the 700-square-mile section of Lake Michigan where researchers suspected the wreckage had settled, she had determined that the plane had shattered upon piercing the surface of the lake and that time had buried the remnants too deep to detect.
“We believe that the debris that would be on the bottom has sunk into the muck over 75 years, and would now be completely covered, and the sonar would not be able to pick it up,” Ms. van Heest said in an interview.
Still, the search, which she estimated had taken nearly 10,000 hours and cost roughly $500,000 — largely from Clive Cussler, a famed author and adventurer who hired experts to partner with them — drew the attention of residents in the region, the news media and the families of those killed in the crash.
“I didn’t really care very much about them finding the plane,” Bill Kaufmann, 81, said in an interview. His mother, Jean Parker Kaufmann, had died in the crash. But he and his sister, along with other families of survivors, attended two memorials that Ms. van Heest helped organize.
One memorial was held after Ms. van Heest and the organization she helped found, the Michigan Shipwreck Research Association, unearthed the forgotten gravesite at Riverview Cemetery in Michigan, where the remains that were retrieved in 1950 were buried. She raised money for a stone engraved with the names of the victims to be placed there in 2008.
Mr. Kaufmann, who was 6 when his mother died, never forgot that he was not allowed to attend a memorial service for her at his Seattle church in 1950, nor that the Korean War had overshadowed the crash.
Before they began searching for the crash, Ms. van Heest and other maritime history enthusiasts at the Michigan Shipwreck Research Association had mostly concerned themselves with searching Lake Michigan to try to find the wreckage of vessels that had gone down more than a century earlier and that no one was alive to remember.
Flight 2501 was different.
“This became so much more personal than just looking for an object on the bottom of the lake,” Ms. van Heest said. “It became a quest to find closure for these families.”
Ms. van Heest dug through historical records and interviewed a Coast Guard officer who searched the lake in 1950 and a chief pilot for the airline, which decades later merged with Delta. She shared what she had found with family members whom she tracked down or who found her through news reports.
“We would have such personal conversations,” Ms. van Heest said. “We would find ourselves crying on the phone, talking about this accident, bringing up stories of how important these individuals were to their families lives.”
Ms. van Heest said that she then wanted to educate the public about the crash. In 2012, “Fatal Crossing,” a book she wrote about Flight 2501, “Fatal Crossing,” was published. She also organized a traveling museum exhibit on the crash.
Over the years, the search dwindled. Mr. Cussler, its primary funder, retired from the search in 2017 and died in 2020. Ms. van Heest’s organization bought its own sonar device and kept going until the spring of 2024.
On Tuesday, she posted on Facebook and emailed a list of family members telling them that the organization was ending its search. The Detroit News reported the news, but many of Ms. van Heest’s emails to family members bounced back, she said, most likely because the recipients had died.
Mr. Kaufmann, whose mother died in the crash, said the loss had devastated his father and resulted in a turbulent childhood. A discovery of the wreckage would not have changed that. But he was still surprised to hear that, at last, the search had not turned up a single piece of the wreckage.
There was one thing that Mr. Kaufmann had hoped to get his hands on from the wreckage, something he had wanted since he was a child: A cowbell that his mother had told him she was bringing home from Europe, where she had been traveling.
“I told Valerie, ‘If you ever find that plane, I want the cowbell,’” he recalled saying to Ms. van Heest more than a decade ago.
“I still want the cowbell, why not?” he said. “But, anyway, it’s long gone.”
Aishvarya Kavi works in the Washington bureau of The Times, helping to cover a variety of political and national news.
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