Downed by lightning eight decades ago, a US airman is finally coming home

By Brad Lendon, Kocha Olarn, CNN

(CNN) — More than 80 years after he took off from an airfield in China, a US Army Air Force pilot is going home.

The route back to the United States for 1st Lt. Franklin McKinney has been long and paved by the term paper of a US Air Force Academy cadet; the friendship of a Thai air force officer; the remarkably clear memories of a villager in her mid-90s; the curiosity of an American expat; and, incredibly, a massive flood in Bangkok.

Remains recovered from a rice paddy in northern Thailand have been confirmed as those of McKinney, who disappeared while flying an F-5E – the reconnaissance version of the twin-engine, twin-tail P-38 Lightning fighter – on November 5, 1944, according to the US Embassy in Bangkok.

The military declared McKinney dead in March 1946, though no crash site had been identified, let alone any remains of the man from Providence, Rhode Island.

But as the embassy release states, the US military maintains a “sacred promise to leave no-one behind” – even decades later.

Happenstance and hard work

The origin of the discovery goes back to 2008. Dan Jackson, then a first-class cadet at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, contacted Sakpinit Promthep, then head of the Royal Thai Air Force Museum, for help as he researched his senior thesis, a history of a China-based fighter squadron that fought in the skies over Thailand in World War II.

The two stayed in touch.

In 2010, Jackson published his first book, “Forgotten Squadron,” which chronicled the exploits of a P-38 squadron flying as part of the famous Flying Tigers, the unit of volunteer Americans formed to give China an air force to fight Japan before the US entered World War II.

By 1944, the Flying Tigers had come under American control, but still flew out of airfields in China, including one in Yunnan, China, where McKinney was based.

Jackson was helped in his research by Richard Hakanson, an independent American researcher living in the Thai city of Chiang Mai who, Jackson says, “loves solving mysteries.”

As the book published, the two wanted to know the fates of some of the US pilots lost in combat in Thailand, including McKinney. But there were few clues to pinpoint the crash site of McKinney’s plane.

That was until 2012, when the ever-curious Jackson got back in touch with Sakpinit at the museum requesting any information Thailand might have on the crash of a US plane in an area near Chiang Mai on November 5, 1944.

Sakpinit said his initial reaction was no, but then he remembered a curious find during flooding at Thai archives in 2011 – an inundation so bad that they had to row boats through the passages of the building.

“We were afraid the humidity would destroy the old documents we kept, so we tried sitting down and sorting through things… It turned out we found a report,” he said in a Facebook video.

It was a telephone log sent from a Thai Air Force wing commander to chiefs in Bangkok, after local officers investigated the crash site of a P-38 photo reconnaissance variant.

“They found one human skull. The cause was listed as a midair lightning strike,” the log said, according to Sakpinit.

A reluctant reconnaissance pilot

Franklin McKinney didn’t like his job, Jackson wrote in another book, 2021’s “Fallen Tigers.” He would have rather been behind the yoke of an aircraft armed with guns, not cameras.

Unarmed recon pilots had to make a quick escape when the enemy approached. That wasn’t McKinney’s style.

“He hated having to fly high and fast and run for home when he encountered hostile aircraft,” Jackson wrote.

McKinney’s cohorts at the 35th Photo Reconnaissance Squadron worried about him, noting that he would return from missions with photos taken from as low as 19,000 feet, in range of enemy interceptors and well below the normal 30,000 feet operational altitude for photo reconnaissance.

At 10:15 a.m. on November 5, 1944, McKinney took off from Beitan Airfield in Yunnan, China, on a mission to photograph Japanese positions in northern Thailand’s Uttaradit and Chiang Mai provinces, as well as in Burma. It would be his last take-off.

That evening, according to Jackson’s book, McKinney’s best friend and bunkmate, 1st Lt. Sterling Barrow, wrote in his journal: “Mac was overdue at 4:15. Haven’t had any word on him yet. God grant he be safe – please!”

As days passed with no word from McKinney, Barrow began to “wonder if enemy fighters had caught the daredevil too low and had shot him down,” Jackson wrote.

But 2nd Lt. Arthur Clarke, the intel officer who had dispatched McKinney on his mission that day, surmised what had happened; severe weather had claimed the flier.

The eyewitness

Hakanson, the expat mystery lover, used the wartime reports Sakpinit recovered from the flooded archives to poke around northern Thailand for years, according to Jackson, but the villages they named were too small to even appear on maps.

Then, in 2017, they came across Fong Inma, 94 years old at the time, and she remembered the events of November 5, 1944.

Hakanson’s meeting with Fong was enough for Jackson to go to Thailand to hear the accounts for himself. In 2018, he met her in person.

Jackson documented her memories in his book and in a report he wrote for the magazine Chiang Mai CityLife in 2019.

The village of Mae Kua was hit by a severe thunderstorm that afternoon, Fong recalled.

Then 21 years old, Fong said she heard the plane first, then heard an explosion and saw smoke rising from the crash site.

“People who first got there said just the upper part of the pilot was left, no legs, no arms. Authorities and villagers made a fire and burned him right there,” Fong told the Thai Public Broadcasting Service in a 2021 documentary.

According to Jackson’s account, Fong said her father, the village headman, removed large pieces of wreckage from the crash site and organized the burial of McKinney’s body right there.

“An archeological dig”

The crash site was forest in 1944, but it was later excavated for rice cultivation, Fong told Jackson. Still, the landowner had continued to find pieces of wreckage for years.

Jackson would return again in 2019, this time bringing with him representatives from the Hawaii-based Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), which is responsible for finding lost American troops.

The search for McKinney’s remains began in earnest in 2022, when nine DPAA specialists arrived at the crash site to begin excavations.

“This excavation was conducted like an archaeological dig, stripping the topsoil layer by layer, and taking the dirt to be sifted through screens with water sprayed on it to find anything useful — aircraft components, personal effects, bone fragments, or anything that could lead to identifying the missing pilot,” Sakpinit said in the Facebook video.

“In the end, they found a small amount of bone fragments.”

That wasn’t enough to positively identify McKinney.

DPAA teams returned for about a month each year from 2023 to earlier this year, each time sifting through yards of earth, narrowing the search area bit by bit, Sakpinit said.

In March, they found more bone fragments, enough to positively ID McKinney, and a repatriation ceremony was held at the US Embassy in Bangkok, he said.

Promise kept

Writing in a Facebook post this week, Jackson lamented that Sterling and Clarke, the two men who saw McKinney off from that Chinese airfield in 1944, had died and are no longer around to hear he is coming home.

But he noted that McKinney’s comrades did live long enough to hear Fong’s account of the crash.

“Her story brought them some measure of closure,” Jackson wrote.

Sterling “told me he wished he could have talked to Frank about it over a beer,” Jackson said.

“I believe they’re having that drink now.”

Now an instructor at the Air Force Academy, Jackson noted the “no-one left behind” bond that spans military generations.

“After almost 82 years, Frank McKinney is home again. America has kept its promise,” he wrote.

McKinney’s name appears on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines, one of 36,286 service members who were lost or never recovered during the war in the Pacific.

As he has now been positively identified, a bronze rosette will appear by his name, as it does to more than 500 others whose remains have been found since the war.

The DPAA website says when it began its current mission to identify World War II missing in 1973, it had a list of 73,690 names worldwide – 71,712 remain.

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