WWII pilot identified 82 years after plane vanished over Thailand

Remains found in 2022, identified by modern forensics

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency on Thursday announced the identification of 1st Lt. Franklin H. McKinney, a 21-year-old U.S. Army Air Forces pilot who vanished during a World War II reconnaissance mission in November 1944. The agency said his remains were identified on May 15, nearly 82 years after his plane disappeared over Southeast Asia.

McKinney served as a pilot with the 35th Photo Reconnaissance Squadron, 14th Air Force. On Nov. 5, 1944, he left a U.S. base in Yunnanyi, China, on a photo reconnaissance mission over Burma and Thailand. He was flying an F-5 Lightning aircraft.

“Photo reconnaissance work by the 35th and the intelligence derived from it helped turn the tide of the war in China,” an Air Force article on the squadron said.

McKinney failed to return from the mission. Personnel from the American Graves Registration Service searched along his planned flight path to the Chinese-Thailand border, the DPAA report said, but found no sign of a crash. His remains were not recovered immediately after the war.

His name was engraved on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines.

According to McKinney’s personnel profile on the DPAA website, a wartime report from the Royal Thai Air Force Museum later provided new leads. The report described a plane that was hit by lightning, exploded and crashed in a wooded area in Lampang Province, Thailand, near the time McKinney’s aircraft vanished.

In 2018, the profile said, third-party researchers found a crash site in that region that they matched with McKinney’s plane. In 2022, a recovery team excavated the site and found human remains. Modern forensic techniques eventually identified them as McKinney’s.

McKinney’s home of record is listed as Rhode Island, according to the DPAA, though that designation indicates where he joined the service rather than his state of origin.

The agency will brief McKinney’s family on the identification, CBS News reported. A rosette will be added next to his name on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery, and McKinney will be laid to rest with full military honors.

MSI previously reported on DPAA’s broader effort to identify long-unknown military remains, including the planned exhumation of 88 USS Arizona unknowns for DNA analysis in March.

The DPAA is a department within the U.S. Department of Defense. It describes its mission as providing “the fullest possible accounting for our missing personnel to their families and the nation.”