Flight 2511 departed Idlewild at 11:52 p.m. and headed south along the Atlantic seaboard. The DC-6B was a sturdy, well-maintained aircraft with 24,836 hours of flight time, powered by four Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engines. Pilot Dale Southard, 45, guided the plane through clouds and instrument conditions as the crew checked in with air traffic control at regular intervals. At 2:07 a.m. on January 6, they reported their position over Wilmington, North Carolina. At 2:31 a.m., they noted passing the Carolina Beach radio beacon. Then silence. No distress call, no warning, nothing. The radio simply went dead over the dark coastal lowlands of southeastern North Carolina.

At roughly 2:45 a.m., farmer Richard Randolph heard an engine sputtering, followed by the screech of tearing metal and an explosion. At first light, his teenage son McArthur walked into the fields and discovered wreckage scattered across the farm. Richard drove to the nearest phone in Bolivia, North Carolina, and called Wilmington Airport at about 7:00 a.m. Bodies and debris blanketed an enormous swath of farmland, marshes, and pine forest. A fragment of aluminum skin washed up on Kure Beach, miles from the main crash site. Investigators recovered 32 of the 34 bodies on the first day. Among the dead was retired Vice Admiral Edward Orrick McDonnell, a Medal of Honor recipient and veteran of both World Wars. Three of the victims had been standby passengers who only secured seats because others canceled their reservations.

One body was conspicuously absent from the main wreckage field. Julian Frank, a New York City lawyer, was found in Snow's Marsh on the far side of the Cape Fear River. His injuries were unlike anything the coroner had seen in aviation disasters: both legs torn away, wire and brass fragments embedded throughout his body, fingers shattered and missing, blackened residue resembling gunshot burns across his skin. Frank had been sitting in the window seat of row 7 -- the precise point where the aircraft's fuselage had first ruptured. At the time of his death, Frank was under investigation by the Manhattan district attorney for misappropriating up to a million dollars in charity scams. He also carried nearly $900,000 in life insurance, some of it purchased the day of the flight.

At a hangar in Wilmington, investigators painstakingly reconstructed 90 percent of the DC-6's fuselage on a wood-and-chicken-wire frame. The forensic evidence was damning. Wire fragments in Frank's body, in nearby seats, and in the carpeting were all low-carbon steel. A severed finger was found embedded in the faceplate of a travel alarm clock. A life jacket from Kure Beach tested positive for nitrate residue. Manganese dioxide -- a component of dry cell batteries -- coated Frank's right hand and the seats around row 7. Residue from the air vents and hat rack near the explosion's origin point contained sodium carbonate, sodium nitrate, and sodium-sulfur compounds: the chemical signatures of a dynamite blast. The Civil Aeronautics Board concluded that a dynamite charge, detonated by a dry cell battery, had been placed beneath the window seat of row 7.

The CAB's chief investigator, Oscar Bakke, presented these findings to the Senate Aviation subcommittee on January 12, 1960, and the FBI assumed control of the criminal investigation eight days later. Despite the mountain of physical evidence pointing to a bomb beneath Julian Frank's seat, no charges were ever filed. The case bore unsettling parallels to National Airlines Flight 967, which had exploded over the Gulf of Mexico just two months earlier in a suspected insurance fraud bombing. The CAB's final report carefully noted Frank's proximity to the blast but assigned no blame. More than six decades later, the FBI investigation remains officially open and unsolved. The farm fields and pine forests near Bolivia, North Carolina, keep their silence.