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I wonder where they were flying out of?

...JPAC spokeswoman Capt. Jamie Dobson said the plane is believed to be a Douglas C-124A Globemaster, a heavy-lifting transport plane that crashed Nov. 22, 1952 while approaching Anchorage....

"The evidence does positively correlate to that wreckage," Dobson said.

The Globemaster was flying from McChord Air Force Base in Washington. With giant bay doors under its nose, the Globemaster, nicknamed "Old Shaky," was the largest cargo plane in the American arsenal at the time, the only aircraft capable of carrying a tank or bulldozer -- or 200 soldiers.

On this flight, it carried 52 men, mostly Air Force and Army personnel and at least one from the Marine Corps and one from the Navy.

It passed Middleton Island, in the Gulf of Alaska south of Prince William Sound, en route to Elmendorf Air Force Base. At about 4 p.m., the captain of a Northwest Orient Airlines passenger plane picked up a distress call.

A scratchy signal made the call almost impossible to understand, but the Northwest pilot heard, "As long as we have to land, we might as well land here."

Silence followed. Nobody heard from the plane again.

http://www.adn.com/2012/06/27/2522442/plane-found-on-glacier.html

I was a flight engineer on ‘old shaky’ flying cargo in the states, SE Asia, Europe, and S America. The older it got the more dependable it got. Thought of as being ‘very forgiving. That is a “C” model flying over San Francisco Bay. Another photo shows a C-141, C-124, and C-130 in formation over the bay. Old models 124A had PW-4360-20A engines with 7 mags and the 124C had pw4360-63 engines with 4 mags and other modifications. Most problems I remember encountering were loosing generators, overspeed props, and loss of oil pressure. Electric props could get away from you and you'd have to shut down. Worse experience I had was extremely rough weather over north atlantic and it took both of us engineers (carried 2 engineers)to maintain throttles, props, card heat, and cowl flaps. Took off from Recife Brazil loaded in the summer and took 30 minutes to get to 1000’. Flew EC121 next and got out before C141 were available to me.

“As long as we have to land, we might as well land here.”

That’s the first thing I thought of - he was trying to land it on the glacier (rather than it just “crashed” into it.) Probably would have made it if it had been a small bush plane. RIP