Remembering the Crew of PB4Y-2 Privateer (BuNo 59645)

Can't remember the total number of naval aircraft lost in ELINT missions but I believe at least 90 crew, a mission that was never widely known. RIP

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."THE RUSSIAN POSITION:

Shortly after the shootdown, the Soviet government acknowledged that its fighters had attacked the Privateer. Further, Stalin’s Foreign Ministry stated that the aircraft was attacked because it was flying in Soviet airspace, and had fired on Soviet fighters when they attempted to signal it to land. The Soviet government also stated at the time (and subsequently) that it had no information about survivors from this flight.

Since the establishment of the Joint Commission, the Russian government has provided considerable documentation on this incident, most of it contemporaneous to 1950. Soviet documents, including after-action reports of the participating pilots and other air defense officers, all appear to support the long-held position that the aircraft violated Soviet airspace and opened fire on Soviet fighters. Another formerly classified document, a report from the Soviet Navy to Stalin and Bulganin, describes in detail extensive, unsuccessful efforts by forty-five vessels between 22 April and 14 June to locate the submerged aircraft. A 1975 Central Committee document, classified SECRET, appears to be an information paper to reassure the Party that there were no survivors of the flight prosecuted or incarcerated in the Soviet Union. This document seems to have been prepared in response to a resurgence of interest in the case in the American press, with allegations that documents reviewed are interviews conducted in late 1992 by Task Force Russian and Jane Reynolds Howard, widow of LTJG Robert D. Reynolds, one of the unaccounted for crew members, including discussions with retired General-Colonel Fedor Ivanovich Shinkarenko, who commanded the Soviet fighter unit that shot down the Privateer. The Shinkarenko interviews support some, but not all, of what the Soviet government had stated in 1950, as well as the version of events described in the above-mentioned documents. Shinkarenko recalled that his pilots did not actually see the plane crash due to cloud cover. In his opinion, “all pilots of the plane died…it’s sad, we had no confirmation that we have found the bodies…they were washed away…If there had been one member of the crew, dead or alive, after the search was carried out…I should have known this…” Shinkarenko also stated that the Soviet had monitored an extensive American search and rescue effort; that the Soviet Navy had been given orders to recover the aircraft, if possible, to show to the United Nations; and, significantly, that he had been told that “remnants of the plane” had indeed been recovered (contrary to the assertions in the document described above”). General Shinkarenko also recalled that Stalin himself had given the order not to show the recovered parts to the UN, “once he knew what the plane contained.”...

I've actually seen these fly over forest fires as water bombers in the late 1990s.