On October 16, 1972, 40-year-old male Nicholas Joseph “Nick” Begich was last seen in Anchorage, Alaska, as he boarded a twin-engine Cessna 310C at Anchorage International Airport for what was supposed to be a routine campaign flight to Juneau. Begich was Alaska’s sole member of the U.S. House of Representatives and was campaigning for reelection. Traveling with him were House Majority Leader Hale Boggs of Louisiana, Begich’s aide Russell L. Brown, and pilot Don E.
Jonz, the president and chief pilot of Pan Alaska Airways. Boggs had come to Alaska to accompany Begich on a short campaign tour, and the men were scheduled to continue their political appearances in Juneau. A witness saw Begich and the other passengers board the aircraft, registration N1812H, shortly before departure. The plane took off from Anchorage at approximately 8:59 that morning and was subsequently observed by air-traffic personnel about two miles south of the airport at an estimated altitude of 2,000 feet, heading southeast. That observation became the last known visual sighting of the aircraft and the four men aboard it. At about 9:09, Jonz contacted the Anchorage Flight Service Station and filed a Visual Flight Rules flight plan, saying he intended to follow the V-317 airway toward Yakutat and then continue directly to Juneau. He estimated the journey would take about three and a half hours and advised that four people were aboard. The flight-service conversation was the final known communication from N1812H.
The circumstances surrounding the departure were troubling because the weather along the proposed route was already known to be difficult. Earlier that morning, Jonz had contacted the Anchorage Flight Service Station for conditions at Juneau, Sitka, Yakutat, and Cordova, telling the briefer that he planned to fly to Juneau under Visual Flight Rules. He received current observations and forecasts and was specifically informed that Portage Pass was expected to be closed. Before departure, the Cessna was refueled with 48.7 gallons of aviation gasoline, and an employee who saw and heard it reported that it appeared and sounded normal. The aircraft had also undergone a 100-hour inspection immediately before the flight, with Pan Alaska personnel reporting no outstanding discrepancies. Investigators found Jonz properly certificated and highly experienced. The concern instead centered on the environment into which the plane was flying. Portage Pass was surrounded by steep mountainous terrain, with mountains rising to several thousand feet on either side. Weather reports showed low ceilings and fog in portions of the route, while forecasts included moderate rime icing in clouds over the Cook Inlet region. At roughly the same time Begich’s flight was preparing to leave Anchorage, the crew of an Air Force helicopter attempting to travel toward Portage encountered moderate to severe turbulence at only about 500 feet, headwinds of approximately 55 knots, low cloud cover and deteriorating forward visibility; that crew abandoned its attempt to reach Portage and used another route. The National Transportation Safety Board ultimately concluded that conditions along the proposed Anchorage-to-Juneau route were not conducive to a flight operating under Visual Flight Rules and that the available evidence suggested the disappearance may have been related to those conditions, although investigators could not establish exactly what happened.
Another unsettling detail emerged from the investigation concerning emergency equipment. During the final radio exchange, the flight-service specialist asked Jonz whether emergency gear and a locator beacon were aboard, and the pilot answered affirmatively. The NTSB investigation, however, concluded that the Cessna itself was not equipped with an emergency locator transmitter and that Jonz did not have a portable emergency locator transmitter or survival equipment when he departed Anchorage. At the time, federal rules did not require that particular aircraft to carry an ELT, although Alaska law prohibited flight within the state without an approved emergency locator transmitter. The absence of a functioning transmitter meant that, once the aircraft disappeared, rescuers had no distress beacon they could trace to a specific location. Even with the severe weather and the lack of a recovered aircraft, the NTSB did not assign a definitive cause. Its formal finding stated that the probable cause could not be determined from the evidence available and that the investigation could be continued if the aircraft were ever found. That distinction remains important: adverse weather presented a serious and well-documented hazard, but no wreckage was available to show whether weather, mechanical difficulty, navigation problems, or some other event actually brought the flight down.
When the Cessna failed to arrive in Juneau, the response became extraordinary in scale. By early afternoon, the Coast Guard Rescue Coordination Center in Juneau had notified the Air Force rescue center at Elmendorf Air Force Base that N1812H was overdue. Attempts were made to contact airports and facilities that might have heard from the aircraft, but the communication checks produced nothing. An Air Force HC-130 was sent out to begin searching, opening what the House historian later described as the largest search-and-rescue operation in American history to that point. Military aircraft from the Air Force, Army and Coast Guard searched alongside Civil Air Patrol crews and civilian pilots. House records describe approximately 40 military aircraft and 50 civilian planes taking part. The NTSB documented 1,033 sorties and more than 3,600 hours of search flying over roughly 325,000 square miles. The effort was not confined to the air: Coast Guard cutters, merchant vessels and fishing boats searched areas including Prince William Sound, the Gulf of Alaska and Icy Strait, while ground crews searched the Portage Pass region more than once. Mountain slopes, glaciers, waterways and coastline were examined repeatedly. For 39 days, searchers looked for the orange-and-white Cessna, wreckage, personal belongings, a signal, or any other indication of where the aircraft had gone. Nothing that could be identified as belonging to N1812H or any of its occupants was recovered.
Begich’s disappearance occurred only weeks before the election, and his name remained on the ballot while the search continued. Alaska voters reelected him to Congress even though he was still missing, an extraordinary consequence of the timing of the disappearance. After the prolonged search produced no trace of the plane, Alaska Governor William A. Egan requested a legal determination concerning Begich and the other Alaska-connected occupants. According to the U.S. House historian, a state jury unanimously declared Begich, Russell Brown and Don Jonz presumed dead and authorized death certificates; a presumptive death certificate was subsequently recorded for Begich in Alaska, and the governor declared his congressional seat vacant. The legal declaration did not mean that Begich’s remains had been recovered. Neither his remains nor those of the other occupants, and neither the main wreckage nor any conclusively identified portion of N1812H, has been found. The NTSB investigation is listed as completed, but its official finding remains that the probable cause could not be determined from the available evidence. In overview, Nicholas Begich was a 40-year-old Alaska congressman who left Anchorage on October 16, 1972, aboard a Cessna 310C bound for Juneau with three other men; after one final radio contact, the aircraft vanished amid hazardous weather, prompting an immense 39-day search across hundreds of thousands of square miles. Despite the resources committed and decades of attention afterward, no physical trace capable of explaining the disappearance has been recovered, leaving the final moments of Begich, Boggs, Brown and Jonz unknown and their families and history with an absence that has never been answered by the discovery of the plane.Last Seen: Oct 16, 1972
