Air cadet who was frozen for 53 years is retrieved from mountainside grave

For 53 years, relatives of four Second World War army cadets whose plane crashed in the California mountains on a training flight have suffered the anguish of not knowing what happened to the bodily remains of their loved ones. Now, thanks to two climbers' fluke discovery of a body preserved in a mountain glacier, one of them may at last be given the dignity of full funerary rites.

The outdoors enthusiasts stumbled across the body a month ago while climbing Mount Mendel, part of the Sierra Nevada range in Kings Canyon National Park, central California.

It was a stroke of luck that they were walking in the right place in a year that had had a particularly long thaw. Most years, the body would have remained under ice, and, according to one forensic science expert, could have remained undiscovered for hundreds of thousands of years. The body is now undergoing tests at Hickam Air Force base in Hawaii to confirm its identity, but that is almost certainly already known. Investigators have saidhe was a Caucasian man in his early 20s, between 5ft 9in and 6ft 2in, with either light brown or sandy blond hair.

There is a partially visible name on a heavily corroded metal badge attached to his brown US Army Air Forces uniform (there was no separate Air Force in the US military until 1947). In his pockets was a collection of coins, a faded address book and a hand-written note with the words "all the girls know" still readable.

Still, the investigative team is making no firm announcements before checking DNA samples and dental information against family records of all four airmen. Their relatives are spread out across the US.

Such belated identifications are not uncommon in the US military. The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, based at Hickam, analyses samples from hundreds of missing servicemen each year and makes positive identifications about twice a week.

What makes this case unusual is that it is 53 years old and that the body's discovery was so fortuitous.

The four had taken off from an air base in Sacramento, the California capital. It was known at the time that they had crashed in the mountains and perished, but forbidding conditions made their recovery impossible. Some debris was found in 1947. A military retrieval team later dug up clothing, a blank navigation log, a dog tag and what their report described as "insufficient remains ... for identification". Until last month, that was the last that was heard of the case.