For decades, the family of a World War II airman who died when his training flight crashed somewhere in a California glacier believed they would never see him again. They learned to accept his loss, painful though it was.

But now, with a set of frozen remains recovered from the same glacier and flown to a lab at Hickam Air Force Base for identification last week, the wait has suddenly become unbearable.

Scott Shriver is convinced the airman is his uncle: Army Aviation Cadet Ernest G. Munn, a 23-year-old from Pleasant Grove, Ohio. Shriver's mother, as well as her two sisters, also are convinced "brother Glenn" finally has been found.

Shriver has followed news accounts of the frozen airman's discovery with soaring anticipation and called the Army lab at Hickam soon after the remains arrived last week. A 47-year-old high school biology teacher from Pittsburgh, Shriver begged the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command to speed up the process of identification.

"I have three, 80-something-year-old women who, frankly, are not in the best of health and may not live long enough to hear the answer to this question," Shriver said.

But the heartbeat of hope can thump faster than the metro-nome of science. The lab's forensic anthropologists have a specific way of identifying remains, whether they are bone fragments dug from the jungles of Vietnam or entire mummified remains chipped from solid ice, said Army Maj. Rumi Nielson-Green, a spokeswoman for the lab.

A positive identification can only be made after careful — and typically time-consuming — analysis, she said.

"We are not working on anyone else's schedule," she said. "We are working on the schedule that the science dictates to us."

Dental records are the lab's identification of choice, Nielson-Green said. If that fails, mitochondrial DNA is used to help the effort, but it has its limits, she said.

For example, a group of white men with similar ancestry, say European, could produce test results so similar they all look like they came from the same family, she said.

When it's used, mitochondrial DNA results are included with other correlating evidence, such as a person's stature and approximate age, clothing found with the remains, X-rays that show known bone breaks and the estimated height of the person.

"We use it to exclude people," Nielson-Green said. "If you run it against known samples and they don't match, you can definitely exclude that person. If they do match, you can include the name, but you can't say it is him. It is a piece of the evidence."

ONE OF FOUR

Munn was one of four airmen on a flight that took off from Mather Field on Nov. 18, 1942. The others were the pilot, 2nd Lt. William A. Gamber, 23, of Fayette, Ohio, and two other aviation cadets, Leo M. Mustonen, 22, of Brainerd, Minn., and John M. Mortenson, 25, of Moscow, Idaho.

They were not seen again.

"My mom said he was her hero," Shriver said. "She really loved him. He was tall and thin with blond hair. He was quite the ladies' man."

Five years after the crash, a pair of climbers found the plane's wreckage, Mortenson's dog tag, "bits of partially decomposed flesh," scraps of clothing and shoes, according to the Army's official report on the accident.

Everything was scattered across a treacherous, 60-degree slope on Darwin Glacier

No bodies were found, according to the report.

A year later, on Oct. 15, 1948, Army officials held a funeral service for the four men at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, Calif.

They buried a single casket beneath a huge headstone, said James Metcalfe, the cemetery's current director. All four men who died were listed on the headstone.

"I am showing four people being interred in this one spot in one casket," Metcalfe said. "It is a mystery and I am trying to put it together with records that are nearly 60 years old."

Few of Munn's relatives have visited the grave, but Munn's father, who died in 1972, was there for the burial, Shriver said.

Shriver doesn't believe his uncle is resting there.

"I think they put in some plane parts, one dog tag and that wee little scrap of flesh," he said. "That is all I know went in. That is what my grandfather said."

It is expected to be months before the lab expects to identify the remains now stored in Hawai'i. That will surely test his 81-year-old mother's emotional endurance, Shriver said.

"The wounds have healed," he said. "But now the wounds have been reopened, and she has her ups and downs. It is exciting to think that her brother will be able to come home and be buried in Ohio. But it is hard. All these memories that were locked and gone are coming back out."

Reach Mike Gordon at mgordon@honoluluadvertiser.com.