For a pen-and-paper RPG scenario, I want the player characters to find and salvage undeveloped film from a crashed early-cold-war or late-WWII photo recon aircraft. Where in the world is it most plausible that the film would survive until the present day?
- As per this news story from the BBC, undeveloped film can survive 70 years under good storage conditions. Here I'm assuming 60 to 80 years in the wreckage of an aircraft. It is not necessary that all photos on the film survive.
- Assume that the crash landing was close to a best case scenario from a film survival viewpoint, almost a belly landing, if that helps.
- It would be good if the crash site was "adventure friendly" terrain. With that I mean desert, jungle, arctic, high mountains, or the like. Of course a salvage operation on a golf course with lots of
mugglesoblivious bystanders has adventure potential, too, so that is not a hard restriction on the answers. - I'm not aware if there were any fundamental technical developments in the timeframe that would alter the film survival. Wet film photo recon was in use until fairly recently and the timeframe might be adjusted if that is necessary to provide a positive answer.
- The story has science-fictional elements, but they don't affect the loss and subsequent recovery of the film. I tagged my question reality-check and would not be unhappy if answers meet the hard-science standard, e.g. by giving documented real-world examples.
Just to clarify: I would prefer a wilderness expedition, not one into dusty, not-yet-declassified archives protected by guards and red tape. That would also be an adventure, but a completely different one. So the film would be undeveloped unless it was developed in flight (some big recon aircraft could do that).
Next clarification: I would like the characters to be the first "discoverers" of the wreck, following a mix of old flight plans and modern satellite imagery. Say it had a long preplanned course, which it left somewhere, and then navigated by dead reckoning to find a friendly airfield somewhere else, all long before GPS and inertial navigation. So it was lost until someone took hyperspectral satellite pictures and started to hunt for the outline of the plane. That's not really part of the question because the different theories and search area reasoning for MH370 are still living memory.
I have a plan what's on the film, somewhat to the side of the historical mission objective. But that isn't relevant for the question.