"It was not just some piece of scrap metal. "I knew that its place was in a museum," Vyacheslav Filippov, a colonel in the Russian Air Force reserve who has written extensively about the Lend-Lease program's Siberian connection, told RFE/RL at the time. The plane spent 69 years on the tundra before a Russian Geographical Society expedition rescued it in 2016 and returned the wreckage to Krasnoyarsk. The body of the captain, Maksim Tyurikov, was found by local hunters about 120 kilometers from the wreck in 1953. The captain, two crew members, and six passengers had left earlier in an ill-fated effort to get help. On May 11, 1947, 27 people were rescued, having spent nearly three weeks in the icebound wreck. On April 23, 1947, it was forced to make an emergency landing with 36 people on board near the village of Volochanka on the Taimyr Peninsula. After the war, it was transferred to civilian aviation, carrying passengers over the frozen tundra above the Arctic Circle. This particular C-47 was sent to the Far North and spent the war conducting reconnaissance and weather-monitoring missions over the Kara Sea. From there, it flew 5,650 kilometers to the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, one of some 14,000 aircraft sent by the United States to the Soviet Union during World War II under the massive Lend-Lease program. On March 12, 1943, the plane was given to the Soviet Air Force in Fairbanks, Alaska, and given the registration USSR-N238. On February 24, 1943, a Douglas C-47 Skytrain transport aircraft with serial number 42-32892 rolled out of a factory in Long Beach, California, and was handed over to the U.S.
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