One Brick Short

In 1942, an AT-7 Navigator, looking suspiciously like a Beechcraft 18, a passenger/cargo/utility aircraft built up until 1970, took off from Mather Field in California for a routine training flight. It never came back.

Now, nearly 66 years later, one of its crew will be buried at home after resting for six decades on a mountain side.

Military officials have identified a body found in August 2007 as Aviation Cadet Ernest G. Munn, U.S. Army Air Forces, of St. Clairsville, Ohio. He will be buried in May in Colerain, Ohio. Munn was one of four men aboard a routine navigation training flight that departed Mather Field, Calif., on Nov. 18, 1942. Their AT-7 Navigator aircraft carried about five hours of fuel, and when the plane did not return to base, a search was initiated. It was suspended about a month later with no results.

Munn is the second cadet to be discovered since the wreck. In October 2005, other hikers in the Sierra Nevadas discovered frozen human remains, circumstantial evidence and personal effects of an aircrew member. The body of Leo M. Mustonen was found about 100 feet away from Munn, frozen in the ice of the glacier upon which the plane had crashed. 

The men’s location had been a secret for five years before 1947 when several hikers on Darwin Glacier in the Sierra Nevada mountain range discovered the wreckage of the AT-7 aircraft. Fragmentary, skeletal remains found at the site were buried as a group in the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, Calif.

Mustonen’s body was found in its Army Air Corps uniform on nearby Mundel Glacier, mummified by the ice that quickly built up around it after the plane crash. His parachute was open but it’s unlikely that he used it, authorities said, describing the condition of his body as “being consistent with a plane crash.” His injuries, including severed legs, were nearly identical to Munn’s.

It’s likely both men were killed in the crash, their bodies thrown clear by the impact.

Still missing from the crash are Cadet John M. Mortenson, 25, of Moscow, Idaho and 2nd Lt. William A. Gamber, 23, of Fayette, Ohio, who was the pilot.