Posted on 01/17/2020 10:58:57 PM PST by nickcarraway
Two Chinese nationals in their early 20s have been found dead at the site of a 1973 plane crash in southern Iceland.
Police said the man and the woman were found near the Sólheimasandur crash site, which draws tourists.
A police spokesman told the BBC a post-mortem would take place early next week to establish the causes of death.
Officers had not found any signs of a "criminal act" by a third party, he said, adding that the bodies showed signs of hypothermia.
In 1973, a US military plane crash-landed on the beach at Sólheimasandur. No one was killed.
The fuselage of the plane still rests at the site, and has become a tourist attraction.
According to a police statement (in Icelandic), officers were first called to the scene on Thursday after people found a woman's body off a footpath leading to the crashed plane. Officers found the man's body a short distance away about two hours later.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
RIP. It’s one thing to do adventure travel. It’s quite another to do it without adequate preparation.
Sounds like this was exposure, but when I was in Iceland a few years ago our guide pointed out a tiny road that led to an out of the way tourist attraction (maybe this one) and said the local farmers were getting really pissed they kept having to haul out tourists in rental cars going where they shouldn’t and getting stuck.
Looks like a DC-3. Also looks like it just landed there, not like it crashed.
Remember that B-29 that had a forced landing in Greenland during WW2?
A bunch of guys fixed it and when they were ground testing it the APU jerked loose, spilled fuel and that beautiful plane burned to a crisp. There was a PBS Show about it years ago. All that hard work wasted.
I guess they were just dying to get a glimpse.
Chinese nationals?
DC-3?
U.S. has/had a military base near Keflavik. Were they OPENLY spying back then, like they are today (at Key West).
Never mind.
US plane. Chinese tourists. Shoulda read closer!
:-/
“Two Chinese nationals in their early 20s have been found dead at the site of a 1973 plane crash in southern Iceland.”
I was surprised to learn that officials knew where this plane was for so many years but just now have found two bodies.
(Seriously, that is what I thought until much later in the article!)
that’s how I read it to
I went to Iceland three years ago and did the brief drive on Highway 1....even stopping at the airplane wreckage site (they have a parking lot there for you). I’d take a guess that in a normal summer day, there’s at least 200 cars that stop there with tourists.
In this case? With no rental car in the parking lot apparently? I would suspect that the two were part of some tourist bus...given 30 minutes by the driver to take pictures and walk around...probably down some side path, and the bus pulls away. Evening came, and the two froze in the local conditions.
B-29’s had APUs?
I would not bring this up if the article was not from the snooty BBC but use of the word “by” in this sentence does not seem correct. I may be wrong since I am just an illiterate old Tennessee boy but would “next to” or “at” have been more appropriate? As it is it led me to think that the poor guy was killed by the crash site.
Bad headline...it sounds like the 1973 Plane crash found two dead Chinese tourists...
Near.
My first read through I thought they had crashed with the plane.
I was an electronics technician on the Navy communications base at Keflavik in ‘63 and ‘64, long before the plane crash mentioned in this story. I walked out of my room one morning in ‘63 and met someone in the hallway who told me that the president had been shot. I think it was a guy named Johnson who told me. Shortly after that I heard someone say that they thought a guy from Texas named Lyndon Johnson had something to do with it. Every rumor imaginable was floating around that base within minutes.
I remember that; what a shame! The excitement as they got the engines running, just to have it burn up...
It was a large portable generator they had in the plane.
Yes, they were used on takeoff and landing.
Darryl Greenamyer’s crew had jury-rigged a gravity feed for the fuel tank, because the pump wasn’t working. While doing taxi testing, the fuel tank fell and threw gasoline on the APU. The guy in the rear of the plane was away for a critical moment, and the rest is (tragic) history.
Perhaps the saddest epilogue to the “Kee Bird” story was a post from a Norwegian helicopter pilot that I read on an aviation page years ago. He said that he regularly flew supplies and heavy cargo to various points around Greenland, and that the plane’s crash site was less than fifty miles from the coast...it would have been no issue to dismantle the plane into its main subsections, helicopter them to the coast, and ship them out on an oceangoing barge.
The guys that rebuilt the Plane put one in there.
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