Curiosty TV - MIA Hunt for a WWII Plane (2020)

MIA Hunt for a WWII Plane

Ex-CIA agent Ben Smith and a retired FBI officer journey through the Jungles of Burma in search of answers to a family mystery. They are searching for a crashed WWII plane that went down in this little-known, but important, theater of WWII, the perilous “Hump” - an airbridge over the Himalayas.

Snippet from Wikipedia: The Hump

The Hump was the name given by Allied pilots in the Second World War to the eastern end of the Himalayan Mountains over which they flew military transport aircraft from India to China to resupply the Chinese war effort of Chiang Kai-shek and the units of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) based in China. Creating an airlift presented the USAAF a considerable challenge in 1942: it had no units trained or equipped for moving cargo, and there were no airfields in the China Burma India Theater (CBI) for basing the large number of transport aircraft that would be needed. Flying over the Himalayas was extremely dangerous and made more difficult by a lack of reliable charts, an absence of radio navigation aids, and a dearth of information about the weather.

The task was initially given to the USAAF's Tenth Air Force, and then to its Air Transport Command (ATC). Because the USAAF had no previous airlift experience as a basis for planning, it assigned commanders who had been key figures in founding the ATC in 1941–1942 to build and direct the operation, which included former civilians with extensive executive experience operating civil air carriers.

Originally referred to as the "India–China Ferry", the successive organizations responsible for carrying out the airlift were the Assam–Burma–China Command (April–July 1942) and the India-China Ferry Command (July–December 1942) of the Tenth Air Force; and the Air Transport Command's India-China Wing (December 1942 – June 1944) and India-China Division (July 1944 – November 1945).

The operation began in April 1942, after Japanese forces blocked the Burma Road, and continued daily until scaled down from August 1945. It procured most of its officers, men, and equipment from the USAAF, augmented by British, British-Indian Army, Commonwealth forces, Burmese labor gangs and an air transport section of the Chinese National Aviation Corporation (CNAC). Final operations were flown in November 1945 to return personnel from China.

The India–China airlift delivered approximately 650,000 tons of materiel to China at great cost in men and aircraft during its 42-month history.

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