Unsolved Histories episode 1: ‘Brothers’

On the first episode of Unsolved Histories: What Happened to Flight 293? meet Greg Barrowman and learn what it was like to live through the aftermath of the tragedy – to understand the loss and the grief, and to never give up searching for answers and for closure.

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When an 8-year-old boy named Greg Barrowman waved goodbye to his teenage brother Bruce at an airfield one June morning, that little boy had no idea that the events that would transpire on that fateful day would profoundly affect him and his family – and dozens of other families around the United States – for the next six decades.

“He was dressed in his uniform and ready to go,” Barrowman said, describing the moment U.S. Army Private Bruce Barrowman, who had just finished basic training, stepped out of the family car and onto the sidewalk near the passenger terminal. “[It was] kind of a proud moment.”

Barrowman explains he was a strict family, not given to public displays of emotion.

“We had one of those good ‘adult’ kinds of goodbyes, where we all got out and stood face to face with a handshake and hugs,” Barrowman said. “We were a little more disciplined, I think, where you were little men and women, instead of a bunch of goofy kids.”

That morning, Bruce, along with 100 other men, women, and children, boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 293, a Military Air Transport Service (MATS) charter flight between McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma, Washington, and Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska.

The Douglas DC-7C

The aircraft was a Douglas DC-7C, one of the last propeller airliners designed and built before the age of jet travel. Most of the passengers were active-duty members of the military, like Bruce, but there were also spouses and dependent children, and a handful of civilian government employees. The crew of six were skilled and experienced civilian employees of Northwest Airlines. Ahead lay what was expected to be a routine flight lasting roughly six hours, ferrying people to military postings and federal jobs in Alaska during the Cold War.

But Flight 293 never arrived at Elmendorf Air Force Base. With no warning and no distress call, the DC-7C crashed into the ocean west of the Dixon Entrance in the Gulf of Alaska. There were no survivors, and no bodies were ever recovered. Among those lost on Flight 293 were individuals traveling alone, but also entire families traveling together.

Barrowman was devastated by the loss of his big brother.

 

After the crash, things would never be the same for the parents, or Barrowman and his remaining three siblings. The disappearance of Flight 293 broke his family apart.

“I think my sister put it best,” Barrowman says. “There was no rudder on the ship [of our family] anymore.”

Military gives up searching

Barrowman’s family, and every other family of those left behind, never got any answers about why the DC-7C crashed, and the military gave up searching for the plane just days after it crashed.

Investigations by the federal government into the cause of the crash were inconclusive, and if the military ever tried to figure out what had happened to Flight 293, any record of that has been lost. And somehow, maybe because Flight 293 was a military charter of a civilian aircraft, the entire tragedy has been virtually forgotten by the Army and the Air Force. Perhaps most tragically, many of the families left behind feel like they have been forgotten, too.