History | Cold War | Area 51
The Mysterious Plane Crash on Mount Charleston
A memorial commemorates the secret 1955 flight
On November 17, 1955, a storm was raging in the Spring Mountains west of Las Vegas.
A C-54 military cargo plane was traveling from Burbank to Area 51 in Nevada that morning. It was a secret military flight that ferried workers from Southern California to the Nevada Test Site and the ultra-secret Area 51. The plane went off course and wound up in that terrible storm, ultimately crashing into 11,916-foot Mt. Charleston, about a half-mile from its peak.
All 14 men aboard were killed.
No one, not even the families of the deceased, knew the details of the flight or why the men were on the plane until after the details were declassified in 1998 — and if one persistent man hadn’t tenaciously pursued information about the crash, those details still might have been forgotten.
For decades, the remnants of the plane littered the area around the trail to the peak of Mt. Charleston. One of the most distinctive pieces left was a propeller, twisted and gnarled. I saw it when my hubby and I hiked to the peak in 1996, and we, like everyone else, simply knew a plane had crashed there.
