NAU, GEORGE

Name: George Nau
Rank/Branch: Civilian
Unit: Flying Tigers Airline, Los Angeles, CA
Date of Birth:
Home City of Record: Pacoima CA
Date of Loss: 16 March 1962
Country of Loss: South Pacific
Loss Coordinates: (none)
Status (in 1973): (none)
Category: (none)
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: Lockheed Super Constellation

Other Personnel in Incident: Civilian air crew; 93 U.S. Army personnel; 3 ARVN
Rangers (all missing)

Source: Compiled by Homecoming II Project 15 June 1990 from one or more of the
following: raw data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with
POW/MIA families, published sources, interviews.

REMARKS:

SYNOPSIS: U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia was still very limited in 1962.
Many Americans were unaware of hostilities there, but already nearly two dozen
Americans had been captured or reported missing. The U.S. supplied military
advisors to both the Royal Lao and the South Vietnamese in efforts to help them
fight the insurgent communist North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao guerrillas, and
maintained limited military personnel in Saigon.

On March 16, 1972, a Lockheed Super Constellation owned by the Flying Tigers
line at Los Angeles International Airport, disappeared between Guam and the
Philippines in the South Pacific.

The Flying Tigers contracted with the military to transport troops and supplies
to Saigon, and this flight had been a transport of U.S. Army personnel. Besides
the flight crew, there were 93 Americans onboard from the U.S. Army and three
Rangers from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.

Crew members on a Standard Oil of California supertanker saw a flash in the sky
roughly the same time and place the Constellation disappeared. The Civil
Aeronautics Board thus believed the aircraft was destroyed in flight.

Others view the accident differently. John Dewey, then the Flying Tigers' lead
investigator on the aircraft's disappearance and quality control director, said
that the Constellation had an excellent safety record, and the only cargo listed
on the manifest was passenger luggage. A security check had been conducted
during passenger loading. Additionally, the flight was made early in the war,
before American aircraft came under attack.

John Dewey was also concerned that there was not a scrap of aircraft wreckage to
be found. The aircraft had floating seat cushions, 150 life jackets, eleven life
rafts (four of which were loaded into the wings to inflate automatically).
Surely all this could not have been completely destroyed.

Subsequently, the 144,000-square-mile search included the island of Mindanao,
where ocean currents seemed to deposit much flotsam. No trace of the aircraft
was found.

Hijacking and covert activity were not ruled out. During a stop on Guam, the
aircraft had been left unattended in an accessible, dimly lighted area of the
airfield. Dewey reported that there was even some speculation that the aircraft
had been hijacked to China. Dewey further asserts that he would know if the
airline had been involved in covert activity, and he ruled out this possibility
as highly improbable.

Despite extensive searches, no trace of the aircraft or its crew and passengers
were ever found. All aboard were simply missing -- not casualties of war, but
merely missing. Even the ARVN who were returning to their own war.

One crewman aboard the aircraft, the flight engineer, was George Nau. Nau worked
for the Flying Tigers to support his wife and four small children. The
frustration and difficulty of her husband's disappearance proved to be too much
for Nau's wife, who was committed to a California mental institution. The four
children were parceled out to foster homes, where they grew up more or less
painfully, haunted by their young, blond and rakishly handsome father's
disappearance and their mother's illness.

In the late-sixties, Catherine Nau Ortiz, nine years old when her father
disappeared, found a POW/MIA advocacy group called VIVA who distributed
bracelets with the names of prisoners of war and missing in action. VIVA refused
to make a bracelet for George Nau. He was not part of the war; he was not on
official government lists.

The Nau children have never stopped looking for answers. Once, a long-lost
cousin who supposedly researched military records, called to say she had found
evidence that George Nau was still alive. But after this one mysterious phone
call, no one in the family has heard from the cousin again.

There are, in the spring of 1990, 2403 Americans still officially unaccounted
for in Southeast Asia. Plus George Nau. Plus his air crew. Plus 93 U.S. Army
personnel lost on his aircraft. Plus how many others whose names remain unknown
because they were outside the official "war zone?"

In the late 1980's a group of names were added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
who had been killed outside the combat zone of Vietnam. But few remember men
like George Nau. If, by some remote chance, this aircraft was hijacked to China,
no one will be looking for him. He's not even official.
