Why Did a Plane Sit on Top of Angel Falls for 33 Years?

On October 9, 1937, American aviator Jimmie Angel landed his Flamingo monoplane on the summit of Venezuela’s Auyán-tepui — and the wheels sank straight into a bog, leaving the aircraft stranded above the world’s tallest waterfall for 33 years, until Venezuelan Air Force helicopters recovered it in 1970.

The World’s Tallest Waterfall

Angel Falls drops a total of 3,212 feet (979 meters), including one unbroken free-fall plunge of roughly 2,648 feet (807 meters) — nearly twenty times the height of Niagara Falls. The cascade is so tall that much of the water atomizes into mist before it ever reaches the canyon floor below. The falls pour off the edge of Auyán-tepui, a massive flat-topped sandstone plateau in Venezuela’s Gran Sabana region, part of the ancient geological formation known as a tepui.

The Indigenous Pemon people of the region had known the falls for generations long before any outsider arrived. They called it Kerepakupai Merú, meaning “waterfall of the deepest place” — a name that describes it more precisely than any that came after.

Who Was Jimmie Angel?

Jimmie Angel was a American bush pilot and adventurer with a reputation for chasing the improbable. He first spotted the enormous waterfall from the air in 1933 — but he was not looking for a waterfall. He was looking for gold.

Angel claimed that in the early 1920s he had been guided to a river of gold somewhere in the Venezuelan highlands by a prospector named McCracken, who died before they could return together. No one has ever verified this story. Whether the gold existed or was a legend of Angel’s own making, it drew him back to Auyán-tepui again and again.

The Landing That Went Wrong

On the morning of October 9, 1937, Angel brought three companions with him: his wife Marie, and two fellow adventurers, Gustavo Henry and Miguel Delgado. He set his Flamingo monoplane — named El Río Caroní — down on the summit plateau, intending to search once more for the source of his elusive fortune.

The moment the wheels touched the ground, they sank. The surface of the tepui’s summit was a waterlogged bog, soft and treacherous beneath its grassy appearance. The plane would not move. There was no runway, no radio rescue, and no easy way down — just thousands of feet of jungle-clad cliff on every side.

The four of them had no choice. They spent 11 days hacking through the dense vegetation along the tepui’s edge, navigating the steep and unforgiving terrain, before finally reaching safety on foot. The plane, meanwhile, stayed exactly where it had sunk: alone on the summit, above the clouds and the mist and the longest waterfall on Earth.

33 Years on the Summit

El Río Caroní became one of the most unusual abandoned aircraft in history. Sitting at roughly 8,000 feet above sea level, exposed to wind, rain, and the relentless humidity of the Venezuelan highlands, the Flamingo monoplane weathered more than three decades on the plateau before anyone came to retrieve it.

In 1970, Venezuelan Air Force helicopters finally reached the summit, carefully disassembled the deteriorated plane, and lifted it off piece by piece. It was subsequently restored and placed on permanent public display in front of the airport in Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela — where it remains today as a testament to one of aviation’s stranger chapters.

A Name That Stuck

Jimmie Angel never found his river of gold. But his repeated, obsessive returns to Auyán-tepui, and the dramatic story of his stranded plane, drew worldwide attention to the waterfall below. Venezuelan authorities officially named it Angel Falls in his honor, and the name has endured internationally ever since — even as the Pemon name, Kerepakupai Merú, continues to be used and recognized within Venezuela.

Angel died in 1956 following injuries from a plane crash in Panama. Per his wishes, his ashes were scattered over the falls that bear his name.