Qualla: 1950 Myrtle Beach USAF C-46D Crash

1950 Myrtle Beach USAF C-46D Crash: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit United States Air Force, Public domain. Most of the men aboard the C-46 had spent the previous two weeks at Myrtle Beach for summer training. They were Tennessee Air National Guardsmen, citizen-airmen with regular jobs back in Nashville and the surrounding country - bank clerks, teachers, farmers, mechanics - who put on uniforms two weeks a year. It was Sunday, July 23, 1950, a hot summer afternoon on the South Carolina coast. The Korean War had begun less than a month earlier, but for the men in this aircraft the war had not arrived yet. They were going home to their families. They never made it.

Image: United States Air Force | Public domain

1950 Myrtle Beach USAF C-46D Crash: The Aircraft

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit United States Air Force, Public domain. The plane was a Curtiss C-46D-10-CU Commando, serial number 44-77577, delivered to the Army Air Forces on December 14, 1944. It had spent the postwar years in various transport roles. In July 1949 it had been converted to a trainer designation, TC-46D, though its essential role o...

Image: United States Air Force | Public domain

1950 Myrtle Beach USAF C-46D Crash: Summer Training

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit United States Air Force, Public domain. The men aboard had just finished two weeks of summer training that involved Air National Guard units from multiple states gathered along the South Carolina coast. About thirty of them were Tennessee Air National Guardsmen who had been training out of Myrtle Beach and were heading...

Image: United States Air Force | Public domain

1950 Myrtle Beach USAF C-46D Crash: The Aileron

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit United States Air Force, Public domain. What happened next took only minutes. The aircraft climbed to somewhere between one and two thousand feet over the pine forest northwest of Myrtle Beach. Without warning the left aileron - the flight control surface on the trailing edge of the left wing that controls roll - broke...

Image: United States Air Force | Public domain

1950 Myrtle Beach USAF C-46D Crash: What the Investigation Found

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit United States Air Force, Public domain. The Air Force accident report identified the cause as the structural failure of the left aileron. Why the aileron broke apart in flight was harder to pin down - fatigue cracking in an aging airframe, possibly, in an aircraft type that had been worked hard since 1944 and was sched...

Image: United States Air Force | Public domain

1950 Myrtle Beach USAF C-46D Crash: The Deadliest in the State

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit United States Air Force, Public domain. Thirty-nine deaths. It remains the deadliest single aviation accident in South Carolina history. There is no major memorial at the crash site, which is on private land and has long since grown back to mixed pine. The Tennessee Air National Guard honored the lost men through unit ...

Image: United States Air Force | Public domain