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U.S. Military Accounts for Pilot Missing Since 1944 WWII Mission
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency identified the remains of 1st Lt. Franklin H. McKinney, who vanished on a November 1944 reconnaissance flight. CBS News reported the accounting announcement on Wednesday after excavation and forensic work at a Thailand crash site.
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The U.S. military announced Wednesday that it has accounted for U.S. Army Air Forces 1st Lt. Franklin H. McKinney, who disappeared during a World War II reconnaissance mission. CBS News reported that McKinney, a 21-year-old pilot from Rhode Island assigned to the 35th Photo Reconnaissance Squadron, took off from a base in Yunnanyi, China, on November 5, 1944, in an F5E-2-LO Lightning aircraft bound for Burma and Thailand.
No radio contact occurred after departure, and the aircraft never returned. CBS News reported that a wartime Royal Thai Air Force Museum document described an aircraft struck by lightning that day, which exploded and crashed in a wooded area of Lampang Province, Thailand. Third-party researchers located a related crash site in a Lampang rice paddy in 2018.
DPAA teams investigated the site in 2019 and 2021. A recovery team excavated it in 2022 and recovered possible human remains, which laboratory analysis using modern forensic techniques identified as McKinney's. His name had been engraved on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines.
McKinney's family will receive a DPAA briefing. A rosette will be placed next to his name on the Walls of the Missing, and the agency will arrange burial with full military honors.
