A group of young locals exploring for aircraft wreckage in the hills of northeastern India discovered what are believed to be parts of a U.S. plane from World War II.
The machinery still needs proper verification by experts, but it appears to be the engine and radiator of a U.S. Army Air Forces plane, according to India’s NorthEast Today magazine. The team suspects the plane was attempting to fly over the Himalayan Mountains in the northeastern-most state in India when it went down.
“We believe it to be the wreckage of [an] American plane used in WW II over the Himalayan range of Arunachal Pradesh, which was [popularly known] as the ‘hump’ among the US Air Force. The location and the engine model also support our assumption,” Taba Nobin, the team leader, told NorthEast Today.
The photos that appeared with the NorthEast Today story were limited to the few pieces of wreckage the team was able to retrieve, but experts at HistoryNet , a group of sister publications, said it’s possible they were from an American B-24 Liberator heavy bomber or its transport version, the C-87 Liberator Express.
Nobin said his team lacked the equipment to pull more pieces of wreckage from the ground in the rough terrain, but they have marked the site for further exploration.
In 2015, 13 members of a team from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency conducted search and recovery efforts in the Himalayan Mountains of Arunachal Pradesh. They found remains of Army Air Corps members who went down in a B-24J aircraft in 1944.
