“... a four seater Cessna civilian aircraft which visited us from time to time. The plane was piloted by an indestructible little Canadian named Max Glasspole, whose devil-may-care attitude was probably better suited to the Royal Flying Corps of 1915 than Katanga 1961. Three previous planes piloted by the intrepid Max had bitten the Katanga dust, but he had walked away smiling from each one of them. Max's routine was to buzz the town on his arrival so that a Jeep could go out and collect him at the airstrip. As he invariably brought mail and hard liquor there was always a rush to greet him, and very soon he achieved a popularity second only to Father Christmas.” (The Road to Kalamata: A Congo Mercenary's Personal Memoir by Mike Hoare)

On 18th September 1961, a Douglas DC-6 aircraft crashed crashed on approach to Ndola Airport in Northern Rhodesia, resulting in the deaths of all 16 people onboard, including Dag Hammarskjöld, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Three official inquiries failed to determine conclusively the cause of the crash. No evidence of a bomb, surface-to-air missile, or hijacking was found, and no evidence of foul play was found in the wreckage of the aircraft. The Rhodesian Air Board concluded that the pilot flew too low and struck trees, thereby bringing the aircraft to the ground.

However, there were suggestions that it was not an accident, but an assassination. This was at the height of the Congo Crisis, and Dag Hammarskjöld was flying to Ndola to negotiate a cease-fire with Katangese troops. Subsequent investigations revealed eye-witness claims of the plane being shot down by another aircraft, and evidence that would support this being suppressed.

The book Who Killed Hammarskjöld? The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa by Susan Williams states that a group of pilots, including Max Glasspole, were at Ndola Airport on the evening of the crash. Glasspole is described as a 'mercenary' and a 'gum-chewing Canadian pilot'. The 2019 film Cold Case Hammarskjöld is about the air crash and conspiracy theory.

The TV series Air Crash Investigation covered the air crash in episode 5 of season 15.

Marginal Revolution offers this information:- White Africans in Rhodesia used the pretext of cracking down on diamond smuggling to suppress black Africans. The key players being Sir Roland "Roy" Welensky, Colonel David Stirling, Jerry Puren, Carlos Huyghe, Dick Browne, and Max Glasspole - these last four names being mercenaries and sabotage bomber pilots who by some bizarre coincidence were at the middle-of-nowhere airport where the pro-Congo and pro-Black Independence UN chief Dag Hammarskjöld's plane mysteriously crashed in 1961. (From www.marginalrevolution.com)

The United Nations investigation into the air crash was still current in September 2019. Max Glasspole is named in UN report A/73/973, and is the subject of UN case file S-0793-13-41.