re: Saturday Night Friday Story: Hale Boggs Disappears in the Alaska Triangle-50 years later

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Here’s what we know: On Oct. 16, 1972, at just before 9 a.m., a Cessna 310C, its registration number, N1812H, laid out in 10-inch tall block letters across the lower margin of its vertical tail, departed from Anchorage International Airport’s Runway 24R (since renumbered as 25R) under gray skies and into what was, at best, marginal flying weather.


The plane seemed fine. The evening before, the pilot had flown the light twin-engine Cessna down from Fairbanks just for this flight. Fresh out of its regular 100-hour maintenance check and fully fueled up again in Anchorage for the charter flight, the 1959 Cessna 310C was in game shape for the planned 575-mile jaunt down to Juneau. No one took special notice. It was just a small plane with four men aboard heading down the coast, just as thousands of small planes had done before and thousands more have done since.

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The pilot, himself a remarkable character, went by the name Don Jonz, though that wasn’t his original name. Jonz, who was 38, had changed his name earlier in his life to distinguish himself from the many thousands of other “Don Joneses” in the world. Jonz (pronounced like “Johns”) owned not only the Cessna twin he was flying but also the small charter company, which he had grandly called Pan Alaska Airways. It was providing the flight free of charge, he reportedly told friends.

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Ten minutes after the Cessna lifted off from Anchorage, Jonz radioed the FAA Flight Service Station in Anchorage to file a flight plan. The pilot told the specialist, with whom he had spoken on the phone earlier in the morning to get a weather update, that the plan was to fly V-317 south all the way down to Yakutat, which is most of the way to Juneau, and then direct from there.

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Regardless, the flight, for however long it lasted, was officially a Visual Flight Rules affair, though Jonz, based on his writings about avoiding icing conditions, wouldn’t have hesitated to jump on the gauges to stay out of or get out of trouble by flying in the clouds for a bit, and by all accounts he would have done so expertly, had the need arisen. That said, the risk of hand flying in actual conditions with probable strong turbulence and possible moderate icing is very high.

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What role the weather played in the loss of N1812H, however, will likely will remain a mystery. In its report, the NTSB determined that the day’s weather along the route of flight was “not conducive” to VFR flight, though it’s not the forecast or weather reports that determine what VFR is but the in-flight visibility. Again, what the weather looked like to Jonz is a detail we’ll never know. Regardless, the NTSB stopped short of saying that Jonz would’ve violated any cloud clearance or visibility rules along whatever segment of the route of flight he wound up completing before some kind of disaster struck, either fire or ice based.

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