Plane Crashes Map: 24 Maps of Crash Sites and Aircraft Wrecks
3,652 air crashes since 1930 and their causes, Sierra wrecks, Zeppelins, 1,810 B-17s, MH370's debris, a glacier returning a wreck, hikes to old crashes.
Updated
People who map plane crashes tend to write down the cause. The largest map here gives
3,652 crashes from 1930 to 2025 a line each, from bad weather to a dropped microphone;
another sorts air disasters by whether anyone walked away. Many more go to one place:
farmland in a drained Dutch sea, a Russian coast where search teams still dig, a Kenyan
mountain where a wreck took two expeditions to find. A few cases draw crowds of their
own. MH370 alone has dozens of maps, most of them under 30 points, and the DC-3 on
Iceland’s Sólheimasandur beach turns up as a stop on one road-trip map after another.
On 9 February 1937 the co-pilot of United 23 dropped his microphone on approach to San Francisco, it jammed the controls, and the DC-3 dived into the bay. Every one of these 3,652 crashes is written up the same way: date, aircraft type, the dead over those aboard (“Fat: 16/16”), route, what happened and the cause, starting with a Ford Tri-Motor lost in bad weather between Tijuana and Los Angeles in 1930. Read in order, the early causes repeat: crews descending below a safe altitude in fog, getting lost, flying into mountains they could not see. Then come the odd ones: a Tupolev ANT-20 in 1942 whose pilot handed the controls to a passenger, the B-25 that hit the Empire State Building in fog in 1945, and thirteen Stukas that flew into a forest in 1939 because the bomber crews had been given an outdated weather report.
On 5 December 1943 a B-24 on a training flight went into Hester Lake; the next day a second B-24, out searching for a plane lost the day before, crashed into Huntington Lake. This map goes with a Fresno Bee series on the Sierra Nevada’s crashes and the search for lost airmen. The Hester Lake wreck was found only in 1960. Two airmen killed on the Mendel glacier in 1942 were recovered in 2005 and 2007, and of a T-33 ditched near Helen Lake in 1957 only the canopy has turned up, found by Boy Scouts on a peak. In 1976 a Lodestar loaded with marijuana crashed into Lower Merced Pass Lake and set off a “pot rush” in Yosemite. Behind the stories sit 175 plain wreck records, such as a white and red Cessna 172.
Air Transat 236 ran out of fuel over the Atlantic in 2001 and glided to the Azores, and all 306 aboard survived; it sits in the layer “All on board survived” with 34 others. This map places 231 accidents from the TV series Air Crash Investigation (Mayday) and sorts them into four layers by outcome: 117 where everyone aboard died, 40 with more dead than survivors, 39 with more survivors than dead, and 35 where all lived. Each note gives the episode code and the cause in a line: a cockpit window that blew out at 17,300 feet over Oxfordshire, a 747 that lost all four engines in volcanic ash and still landed at Jakarta, a B-2 bomber that stalled on take-off at Guam because water had condensed in its sensors.
The first passenger Zeppelin, LZ 7 Deutschland, came down in the Teutoburg Forest on 28 June 1910 without a single death. This map follows airship losses from there: the DELAG passenger ships, then the war, when the naval and army airships raiding Britain were shot down over Essex, Hertfordshire and the North Sea. L.19 went into the sea in February 1916, and its survivors were seen by the British trawler King Stephen, which refused to take them aboard. LZ 37 crashed onto a convent in Ghent, L.39 into a garden on the Boulevard Gambetta in Compiègne, and L.45 drifted after the “Silent Raid” all the way to the hills of southern France. A last layer runs on to the R101, the USS Akron and the Hindenburg in 1937.
When the Zuiderzee was drained to make Flevoland, the farmers found what had sunk in it. This map lists 97 ships turned up in the new fields, such as a large 13th-century cog first reported on plot A 57 in 1952 and struck again by drainage works in 1980, beside 53 aircraft wrecks, each placed by its farm plot and house number. A Hampden lost on 10 August 1940 gave the Noordoostpolder “the last drowned man of Schokland”; the rest of its crew was never found. Behind Urkerweg 14 in Emmeloord, remains of another Hampden came up in 1952, and the note admits that almost nothing is known about it: not where it came from, when it fell or who flew it. A B-17 that belly-landed in the reeds near Urk on 8 October 1943 was watched by people from Urk, who came to help the crew.
“March 8 2014, 12:41 a.m.: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 departs Kuala Lumpur.” From there this map follows the search in 916 points: the last radar returns logged by Flightradar24 and FlightAware, the satellite arcs, the zones combed in the Indian Ocean, and every sighting claim as it came in, from a New Zealander on an oil rig off Vietnam who saw something burning to six Swiss cruise passengers near the Sunda Strait. The note under that sighting adds that none of the claims was confirmed by the authorities. A debris layer then logs what washed up from 2015: the flaperon on Réunion, a panel marked “No Step” on a Mozambique sandbank, and a stainless steel fridge, flagged “NOT from a plane”.
The first entry is Model 299, the B-17’s prototype, which crashed at Wright Field on 30 October 1935, and the list runs on past the war to warbirds lost at air shows. Most of the 1,810 points come from the Missing Air Crew Reports, sorted into one layer per year, and each gives the serial, the nickname painted on the nose, the bomb group and squadron, and what became of the crew in a code: KIA, POW, RTD for those who returned. “Bab’s Best” lost six killed and four captured near Osnabrück in July 1943; “All American” brought all ten home. Each point links to the aircraft’s page on b17flyingfortress.de.
A C-124 Globemaster crashed into Mount Gannett in Alaska on 22 November 1952 with 52 people aboard, and the glacier is still handing it back. This map needs only three objects to tell it: the crash site at about 8,000 feet, the path the debris has taken down Colony Glacier, and the recovery area today. The note gives the speed: the wreckage moves 200 to 300 metres a year, as it has every year since 1952.
One F-14 fan tracks every Tomcat there is: 136 on display from Huntsville to Isfahan, one Iranian jet spotted on Google Maps in 2017, and 302 crash sites and mishaps, each with its date, Bureau Number and a link to the F-14 Association. Where the crash place is unknown, the map parks the point on a grid near 80 degrees north. One point in the Indian Ocean near Diego Garcia carries a note by a crewman who ejected there on 19 December 1981, written in 2020: “That was my ejection”, the result of an arresting gear set wrong on the carrier.
None of these 332 planes has been found. The map collects crashes in Krasnodar Krai that search teams have not yet located, from the memories of old residents, war memoirs and forum posts. A grandmother from Krinitsa near Gelendzhik remembers three planes that came down and were dismantled and taken away during the war. Locals say the crew of a German bomber off Arkhipo-Osipovka washed ashore, probably in spring 1943, and were buried on the beach after their warm flying jackets had been taken. Someone else saw an aircraft undercarriage propped by a cottage in the Cherkessky gorge and forgot to ask where it came from. Its companion map, of planes already found, dates each discovery: a Ju 87 on Mount Myskhako in 1998, a Bf 110 near Tuapse in 2013.
Gander lay on the wartime ferry route across the North Atlantic, and the woods around it are full of what did not make it. This map holds 17 crash sites one person has visited, each with its archaeological site code: B-17s that crashed in August and December 1944, an RCAF Hurricane, a Digby, a Canso, a Lodestar, then a DC-4 in 1946, an RB-45C Tornado in Labrador in 1951 and an RB-36H in 1953. A second layer lists 17 heritage sites, from the Harbour Grace airfield where Amelia Earhart began her solo Atlantic flight to the trail in the Thomas Howe Demonstration Forest where a B-17 wreck can be seen from the path. The description warns that the sites are protected and the coordinates only approximate.
A cadet on the last cross-country flight before his graduation fell about 2,000 feet at the edge of Kelly Field on 14 November 1917; it is believed he fainted. This map holds 1,334 points around San Antonio’s training fields, Kelly, Duncan, Brooks and Randolph, with aerial photos of the landing fields, and it reads like the daily log of learning to fly: tailspins from 150, 300 and 400 feet, two cadets colliding while practising landings, an engine quitting near Converse. Not all end badly: one pilot got lost, landed in a field south of St. Edward’s College, fixed his aircraft and flew on to Penn Field. In 1918 a corporal starting an aeroplane by hand was struck in the face by the propeller.
On the night of 30 April 1941 a Wellington bomber caught the cable of a barrage balloon over Bristol and dragged it across the rooftops. This map follows its last minute in 13 points told by the people who were there: the balloon sites in two recreation grounds, a chimney pot knocked off on Hurlingham Road, a pine tree whose top the left wing took off below roof height, the damage “still seen today (2008)”. The cable wrapped itself round an elm and tore it out by the roots, and the plane came down in St Andrews Park and split in two. A young man walking his girlfriend home from the cinema and a family from Maurice Road pulled out the rear gunner and the pilot; a memorial has stood there since 2009.
“We must be on you, but cannot see you – but gas is running low.” This map plots Earhart’s 1937 flight round the world from Oakland, stop by stop through Natal, Dakar, Karachi and Bandoeng to Lae, with photos and receipts from Purdue’s archive: hangar storage in San Juan, fuel bought at Fort Lamy. The last leg is told radio call by radio call from the reporter’s notes aboard the Itasca, “200 miles out”, “100 miles out”, up to “We are on the line 157 337” at 8:43 a.m. Then the map lays out the theories: a corrected flight path, the islands of the Phoenix group, and Nikumaroro, where TIGHAR thinks she landed, beside the wreck of the SS Norwich City.
Red planes lost their whole crew, yellow had dead and survivors, green brought everyone through. In three languages, Danish, German and English, this map marks 72 Allied and German crashes and emergency landings in Southern Jutland, by the German border, from witness statements and old photos. The Wellington that fell on 20 August 1941 left no survivors of six; a B-17 crew all lived, seven of them captured and two helped across to Sweden. In the Luftwaffe layer many are fighters and trainers whose crews survived, and 17 memorials stand where the bombers came down.
The grid reported “some 14 years previous” turned up nothing, nor did the next one: maps and geodata had changed since the wreck was first seen. This map logs a 2016 expedition to recover Blenheim Z7763, lost on Mount Kenya with four South African airmen. It marks the Castle Gate entry, the base camp at Kamweti, a helicopter landing site picked for evacuating casualties, the camp at 2,911 metres and the crash site camp under the canopy. The recovery routes show what the forest costs: 3.5 miles in 5 hours 18 minutes on the first day in, and 0.3 miles in an hour and a half on the search.
On 13 May 1948 a light aircraft carrying Kathleen Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s sister, was struck by lightning over Saint-Bauzille. This map of the hills around Mont Mézenc and Mont Devès in Ardèche and Haute-Loire counts 28 crashes since a British bomber hit the rock of Bourboulas on 3 November 1943. Bad weather recurs, and so do military jets: a Mirage and a Fouga Magister in 1968, a Kuwaiti military aircraft with eight dead in 1979. In 1963 a British plane flew through houses at Jaujac and killed four people on the ground while its pilots walked away, and in 1971 a twin-engined plane carrying 21 scientists and soldiers crashed at Mézilhac.
Two KC-135 tankers went down in the Atlantic on 28 August 1963, and this map notes that the Bermuda Triangle telling of the story, by Winer, Berlitz and Gaddis, is not quite what was recorded. It draws the Triangle between Miami, Bermuda and San Juan and places the cases that made it famous: Flight 19, five Avengers lost on a training flight in December 1945, the airliners Star Tiger and Star Ariel in 1948 and 1949, a DST missing on the last stretch from San Juan to Miami. Ships stand beside them, from USS Cyclops in 1918 to the Connemara IV, a yacht found adrift in 1955 after riding out three hurricanes with no one aboard.
Josef František, a sergeant of No. 303 Squadron with 17 kills, crashed in Surrey on 8 October 1940; his point is one of 311 on this Czech-language memorial map. Each record gives rank, unit, aircraft type, serial and squadron code, the crew, and photo numbers for their portraits. The crash sites follow the Czechoslovaks who escaped to fly for the RAF: Spitfires lost on weather reconnaissance over the Channel, a No. 311 Squadron Wellington off the Dutch coast, and further crashes in Russia, Egypt, Morocco and the Bahamas.
Northeast Airlines Flight 792 crashed near Mt. Success in New Hampshire on 30 November 1954, and this map is one hiker’s three-day winter route to the wreck. The waypoint “Begin Path to DC-3” marks where the hiker left the Appalachian Trail into snow, with a note that in warmer months a faint herd path leads in. Another point marks where the salvage road cut in 1954 should end; the hiker found no trace of it, “presumably grown in during the 70 years since the crash”. Dryad Falls was skipped for the cheesesteaks waiting at Gentian Pond Shelter.
“This is the place where we found some plane’s pieces,” says the crash site of Bum’s Rush, a bomber of the 99th Bomb Group that came down near Pavone del Mella in northern Italy. The map follows its crew from there, each man in his own layer. A witness point, “Sebastiano’s Grandma”, marks where she saw the plane chased by German fighters; others mark a farmstead burned in the crash and a hideout where villagers kept part of the crew. Then come the POW forced march across Italy and Austria and a route titled “Rudy Walks to Switzerland”.
Project Recover searches the sea floor for aircraft that carried American servicemen missing in action, and this map marks its missions. In Chuuk the team spent 50 days on the water over four missions and surveyed 27 square miles of seabed at 100 to 215 feet. In Hansa Bay off Papua New Guinea it found the B-24 “Heaven Can Wait” in 2018, linked to 11 missing airmen. Other missions went off Kuwait for an A-6E shot down in Desert Storm, into Lake Balaton, and off Denmark with the Royal Danish Navy, where two B-24s went down.
Five crashes on this map are dated 14 January 1944, the night of an RAF raid on Braunschweig: Lancasters at Adelheidsdorf and Osterwieck, a “Feindbomber” behind the Rautheimer Holz. Uwe Krebs places 609 crashes across Lower Saxony and the Altmark in three layers, Luftwaffe, RAF and USAAF, and gives each its date, serial and squadron code down to the field: “Ehra-Lessien, 200 m westlich”. The Luftwaffe layer is the largest, from a Do 23 near Celle in September 1939 to Fw 190s around the airfields of Faßberg and Wesendorf in the last winter of the war.
An RCAF Dakota flew into Mount Ptolemy in Alberta in 1946 and fell down its face, killing the seven men aboard, and this map is one group’s hike to the wreck, warts and all. “The directions that we got at Frank Slide weren’t quite right,” so a quicker road from the highway is added. The yellow bridge you are told not to drive over now has a 10-ton limit and “it’s really no problem”. One climb is marked as a polygon, “Steep Hike #1”, where the author admits to wheezing at the top. The last line runs to Blairmore Hospital: a friend gashed his finger on the wreckage.
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