The airplane loss data for the 345th Bomb Group can also be sorted to display the current (November 2019) Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) recovery status for those aircrews.
In the map above, the data have been divided into three types, which are identified by the three different colored dots. Green indicates that the entire aircrew was rescued, returned after being POW, or that the remains of the entire aircrew have been recovered. A yellow dot indicates that some of the aircrew were either rescued, returned from POW status, or that the remains of only some of the crew were recovered. The black dot with the red border indicates that none of that aircrew has been recovered.
Of the 118 downed airplanes of the 345th Bomb Group, 40% have fully returned or recovered crews, 26% have had some of the crew returned or recovered, and 34% have crews that have had no one returned or recovered. In many ways, the 71 aircrews that have not yet been fully recovered represent the greatest challenge to the recovery efforts because many of those crash sites were located in the Pacific ocean or were instances where the aircraft was not observed to crash and therefore any search would have to cover a very wide area of both terrestrial and underwater environments.
[The time listed with the crash date is not an accurate reflection of the event and will be corrected to display the known crash time in a future update.]