As a kid I remember seeing these flying over Gary Indiana of say around ‘60 and ‘61. The seems so huge to me at the time. I wonder where they were flying out of?
Could be Scott AFB or Dover AFB. The one I flew on, and on, and on..was Oklahoma Air Guard.
The C-124 wasn’t at Scott until 1966. That’s the only Midwest location I can find where the plane was stationed. As a kid I used to hear air cargo types often mention flying in and out of Palatine, Ill ( different planes in the late 60s ) but web searches give no air force history for that place. Some type of operation was there.
...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