In the following years, the Dakota aircraft was gradually buried under seasonal snow accumulation and was advected down-glacier as result of ice dynamics. Mercanton, who argued that the Dakota could be used to learn more about the internal motion of glaciers for future glaciological studies ( Archiv-Gletscherkommision SANW, 1946-1947). Once the Dakota was found and the passengers rescued, the airplane was left on the glacier at the request of the president of the Swiss glacier commission, Prof. In 1946, when a Douglas C-53 Dakota airplane crashed in the upper accumulation area of the Gauligletscher (Berner Oberland, Switzerland). To our knowledge, a modeling approach has never been used to estimate the trajectory of a crashed airplane within the ice. The wreckages were found ~80 m beneath the ice surface ( Annan, 2004). Two Boeing B-17 and six Lockheed P-38 that landed on Greenland's east coast ( Wieland, 1997) were abandoned on the ice sheet in 1942, and located using Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) in 1992. This was the case on Glacier des Bossons (Massif du Mont Blanc, France), where pieces of two airplanes that crashed in 1950 and in 1966 were found in recent decades ( Sesiano, 1982 Samuel, 2014). In some cases, pieces of crashed airplanes re-appeared several years after the crash in the ablation area. For crashes that occurred in the accumulation area, the wreckage was buried naturally under layers of snow and ice and transported along with the ice flow. Due to their remote locations, most of these aircraft have not been recovered.
In the last century, more than 50 airplanes crashed on glaciers in Antarctica, Greenland, and in high mountain environments ( Aviation Safety Network, 2018). Our modeling results indicate that the recently found pieces of the Dakota might have been removed from the original aircraft location and moved down-glacier before being abandoned in the late 40s. Our results suggest that the main body of the damaged aircraft will be released approximately between 20, 1 km upstream of the parts that emerged between 20. In a second step the modeled ice velocity fields were integrated forward-in-time, starting from the crash location. As a first step we modeled the ice flow field and the evolution of Gauligletscher from 1946 using a combined Stokes ice flow and surface mass balance model, which was calibrated with surface elevation and velocity observations. Our aim was to localize its present position and predict when and where it would re-appear at the surface. In this study we used a modeling approach to reconstruct the space-time trajectory of the Dakota airplane which crashed on the Gauligletscher in 1946 and was subsequently buried by snow accumulation.