Wreckage found under 25 feet of water leaves authorities searching for answers

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Al.com
By Ron Colquitt
March 12, 2008


A fisherman experimenting with his new sonar detection device discovered the wreckage of a single-engine airplane this week under about 25 feet of water in Big Creek Lake, authorities said.

The fisherman, Teddy Shepherd, made the discovery about noon Monday near the lake's boat ramp. The plane appeared to be upside down but not badly broken up, he said.

"At first I didn't believe it and had to take a second look," he said. "There is not supposed to be a plane under water."

Kate Johnson, Mobile County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman, said divers with the Sheriff's Flotilla went down Tuesday and did not find any bodies in or near the plane, which was identified as a Beechcraft Sierra.

She said the water was murky, and the divers had trouble reading the plane's tail number. As a result, they are not sure if they got the right number to report to the Federal Aviation Administration to help determine ownership.

Johnson said flotilla members brought up a seat cushion, part of the landing gear and what appeared to be a side window. She said no drugs or personal items that would help identify the plane's owner or the pilot were found during the dives.

There have been no reports of recent plane crashes in that area of northwest Mobile County, she said.

That type of plane carries four people and has retractable landing gear, according to Jim Coleman, a Baldwin County attorney and private pilot. Coleman did not see the plane but was told about it by the Press-Register.

The Mobile Area Water and Sewer System regulates the lake, which is the city's drinking water source.

"The only concern for water quality is if the plane is moved," MAWSS Director Malcolm Steeves said Tuesday. "We would hope there would be care taken to contain any fuel or other cargo that might have potential for causing problems."

Johnson said it could be days or weeks before the plane is removed.

Shepherd, 45, said he bought the sonar device for $1,000 four days before he took it to Big Creek Lake to try it out. He purchased it from a Baldwin County search and rescue organization.

Shepherd uses the instrument to search for underwater objects, such as trees or parts of old bridges, that attract fish. It can detect objects up to 400 feet deep.

Coleman, the 52-year-old attorney, has been a pilot for about 10 years and volunteers with the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary in its searches for missing people, dead bodies and water pollution.

He said there is a small grass landing strip near the lake and other places nearby that a pilot could put a plane down in an emergency. The lake also is just a few miles north of Mobile Regional Airport.

Coleman said the plane has two doors, so it would be easy for an uninjured person to escape in an emergency.


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History group seeks to link zipper pull to Amelia Earhart

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pennlive.com
February 17, 2008


MEADVILLE, Pa. — An aviation history group is turning to a historical society to see if a defunct zipper maker made a zipper pull found on an island where they think Amelia Earhart may have disappeared.

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery asked the Crawford County Historical Society for help in determining the date of a small brass zipper pull made by Talon, a hookless fastener company that operated in Meadville from 1913 through the late 1980s.

The aviation group members found the pull in 2007 on Nikumaroro, a coral atoll in the western Pacific Ocean.

The island sits along the flight path from New Guinea to Howland Island that Earhart was following when her Lockheed Electra disappeared on July 2, 1937. The aviation group members theorize that the plane crashed on or near the island.

"This is exciting stuff," said Ric Gillespie, executive director of Delaware-based aviation group. "Now we have this site on the island that is producing artifacts that speak of an American woman in her 30s, and the only one missing out there is her. So, this is solid stuff."

The aviation group members would like to know when the pull was made to see if it was available when Earhart disappeared.

Anne Stewart of the historical society said she learned that Talon didn't begin stamping only "Talon" on its products until Jan. 24, 1937.

But Stewart said she is skeptical the pull could have belonged to Earhart in part because Col. Lewis Walker, who brought Talon forerunner Automatic Hook and Eye Co. to Meadville, actively promoted his product.

He would probably have capitalized on the publicity from Earhart's use of his product, yet there is no evidence he did so, she said.

"I would say that it is quite possible that Amelia Earhart was wearing a suit with a zipper on it. I'm just not willing to say that the one they found was one of them," Stewart said.

Stewart said more research must be done because a lot of Talon information is scattered about the Meadville area.

Gillespie said he wants to go to Meadville to compare the pull to archived Talon items.


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Edmund Fitzgerald explorer looks for Dr. Amano's plane

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SooToday.com
By Carol Martin
January 27, 2008

Dr. Ness Amano's single-engine Cessna 172 was last seen taking off from Sault Ste. Marie around 2:30 p.m. on July 24, 2005.

Searchers combed the area from Sault Ste. Marie to Wawa and Marathon using airplanes, helicopters, and boats as well as ground searches.

But no sign of the Marathon, Ontario dentist was ever found.

His wife and mother remain hopeful that the mystery of his disappearance will be solved.

And for help, they've turned to Tom Farnquist, the man who retrieved the bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Farnquist is executive director of the Michigan Soo-based Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society.

He's shown with significant other Chris Sams, who is also the shipwreck society's business manager, at a meeting this past week of the Sault Ste. Marie Power and Sail Squadron at the Marconi Hall.

The intrepid adventurers head a team of researchers from the society who operate a remotely operated vehicle [ROV] that's managed to find more than a few wrecks that many thought were lost forever.

Farnquist's presentation at the Marconi disclosed details of planned search for Dr Amano's missing aircraft next summer in Batchawana Bay next summer.

"The OPP and others who participated in the initial search did a great job," he said. "But I guess they said it was highly unlikely that he could be in the area outside where they searched."

"The family would like us to continue to look outside that area just to cover all the bases and maybe help them bring some closure even if we don't find anything."

"The family heard that we have some capability to find some very small objects, even in very deep water," he said. "They contacted us in hopes that we can help."

The ROV the team uses is a Phantom S4 and it's worth about a quarter of a million dollars, said Farnquist.

"It's equipped with a robot arm and enough power to almost tow a water skier," joked Farnquist. "But seriously, we needed a little more power than the average robot to cope with the currents we get, especially in Lake Superior."

The team searches for wrecks mostly in northern Lake Huron and Michigan and Eastern Lake Superior.

Farnquist said that the wrecks they've found in Lake Superior have so far been free of zebra mussels but the ones in the lower lakes are so encrusted that they are almost unrecognizable.

Some are on the verge of collapse from the weight of the invasive mussels encrusting them.

The most recent discovery the group made came as a surprise to everybody but but Sams, who kept telling Farnquist it wasn't the wreck he thought it was.

"When we found it, we thought it was the D.M. Clemson," he says. "But she [Sams] was standing behind me telling me it was the Cyprus. There I was telling her to leave me alone as I was trying to fly this expensive robot around the wreck and find the name without tangling it in the harness and there it was as clear as day - the name Cyprus was unmistakable."

The pair have been diving and searching for wrecks for about 15 years and have found many a treasure together.

Next summer they hope to find a few answers for the family of Dr. Ness Amano as well.


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Old landing gear linked to 1945 airplane crash

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Jacksonville.com
By Charlie Patton
January 18, 2008

Although the Navy says it is still investigating the source of a large airplane landing gear snagged off the St. Augustine coast in a shrimper's net in early December, two local experts on vintage military aircraft say they are certain it's from a World War II-era bomber manufactured as a B-24.

Roy Stafford, a former Marine pilot who for many years restored vintage aircraft and now consults for museums and collectors, said the landing gear came off a PB4Y-1, which was originally manufactured for use by the Army Air Corps as a B-24 Liberator but was converted for use by the Navy. An official with the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, after reviewing photos Stafford sent him, agreed that the gear came from a PB4Y-1.

Stafford, who viewed the landing gear at the urging of Mike Collins, a retired FBI agent and former Air Force investigator who now works as a private investigator on Amelia Island, said he is 99 percent sure they know the specific plane from which the landing gear came.

After reviewing an Internet site that lists what happened to all PB4Y-1 aircraft, Stafford and Collins concluded this gear came from a plane that crashed off the coast of Mayport on April 17, 1945, killing 12 of 13 men aboard.

According to contemporary accounts in The Florida Times-Union and in the Jacksonville Journal, the plane crashed during a morning training flight that began at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station, which was located at Jacksonville's Municipal Airport. Later called Imeson Airport, it is now the site of Imeson Industrial Park.

Two Jacksonville residents were listed among those who were killed in the crash: the pilot, Lt. Donald LeGarde Jackson, and Ens. David Foreman Hayes.

According to a copy of a post-crash Navy report that Collins obtained from the organization Aviation Archaeology Investigation and Research, a fire near the cockpit caused the aircraft to spin into the ocean about 3 miles off Mayport. One crew member, James H. Mulkey of Seattle, bailed out and was picked up by a Navy boat.

At the time of the crash, World War II was still being fought on two fronts. Allied forces were closing in on Berlin while fighting between American and Japanese forces raged on the Pacific island of Okinawa.

Last Dec. 1, shrimper Jerry Dean Armstrong was operating his boat off the coast of St. Augustine when a large object tangled in his nets. Unable to free it or bring it to the surface, Armstrong returned to Mayport and the docks of the Mat Roland Seafood Co., where the landing gear remains.

Navy personnel examined the landing gear at the time but as of Thursday they had made no determination.

"The investigation is ongoing," said Bill Austin, a spokesman for Mayport Naval Station.


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WWII P-38 Fighter Discovered in Wales

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Dallas History
November 15, 2007

NEW YORK - Sixty-five years after an American P-38 fighter plane ran out of gas and crash-landed on a beach in Wales, the long-forgotten World War II relic has emerged from the surf and sand where it lay buried.

Beach strollers, sunbathers and swimmers often frolicked within a few yards of the aircraft, unaware of its existence until last summer, when unusual weather caused the sand to shift and erode.

The revelation of the Lockheed "Lightning" fighter, with its distinctive twin-boom design, has stirred interest in British aviation circles and among officials of the country's aircraft museums, ready to reclaim another artifact from history's greatest armed conflict.

Based on its serial number and other records, "the fighter is arguably the oldest P-38 in existence, and the oldest surviving 8th Air Force combat aircraft of any type," said Ric Gillespie, who heads a U.S.-based nonprofit group dedicated to preserving historic aircraft. "In that respect it's a major find, of exceptional interest to British and American aviation historians."

Gillespie finds romance as well as historic significance in the discovery of the aircraft, long forgotten by the U.S. government.

"It's sort of like `Brigadoon,' the mythical Scottish village that appears and disappears," he said. "Although the Welsh aren't too happy about that analogy — they have some famous legends of their own."

Gillespie's organization, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, learned of the plane's existence in September from a British air history enthusiast and sent a team to survey the site last month. The group plans to collaborate with British museum experts in recovering the fragile but nearly intact aircraft next spring.

The Imperial War Museum Duxford and the Royal Air Force Museum are among the institutions expressing interest.

"The difficult part is to keep such a dramatic discovery secret. Looting of historic wrecks, aircraft or ships, is a major problem, in Britain as it is worldwide," Gillespie said.

British aviation publications have been circumspect about disclosing the exact location, and local Welsh authorities have agreed to keep the plane under surveillance whenever it is exposed by the tides of the Irish Sea, he said. For now, the aircraft is again buried under sand.

Officially, the U.S. Air Force considers any aircraft lost before Nov. 19, 1961 — when a fire destroyed many records — as "formally abandoned," and has an interest in such cases only if human remains are involved.

The twin-engine P-38, a radical design conceived by Lockheed design genius Clarence "Kelly" Johnson in the late 1930s, became one of the war's most successful fighter planes, serving in Europe and the Pacific. About 10,000 of the planes were built, and about 32 complete or partial airframes are believed to still exist, perhaps 10 in flying condition.

Another P-38, part of a "lost squadron" of warplanes marooned by bad weather in Greenland while being flown to Europe in 1942, was recovered and extensively restored with new parts. Dubbed "Glacier Girl," its attempt to complete the flight to Britain earlier this year was thwarted by mechanical problems.

The Wales Lightning, built in 1941, reached Britain in early 1942 and flew combat missions along the Dutch-Belgian coast.

Second Lt. Robert F. "Fred" Elliott, 24, of Rich Square, N.C., was on a gunnery practice mission on Sept. 27, 1942, when a fuel supply error forced him to make an emergency landing on the nearest suitable place — the Welsh beach.

His belly landing in shallow water sheared off a wingtip, but Elliott escaped unhurt. Less than three months later, the veteran of more than 10 combat missions was shot down over Tunisia, in North Africa. His plane and body were never found.

As the disabled P-38 could not be flown off the beach, "American officers had the guns removed, and the records say the aircraft was salvaged, but it wasn't," Gillespie said. "It was gradually covered with sand, and there it sat for 65 years. With censorship in force and British beaches closed to the public during the war, nobody knew it was there."

It was first spotted by a family enjoying a day at the beach on July 31.

The discovery was stunning news for Robert Elliott, 64, of Blountville, Tenn., the pilot's nephew and only surviving relative. He has spent nearly 30 years trying to learn more about his namesake's career and death.

All he knew of the Wales incident was a one-line entry saying Elliott had "ditched a P-38 and was uninjured."

"So this is just a monumental discovery, and a very emotional thing," said Elliott, an engineering consultant. He said he hopes to be present for the recovery.


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Divers salvage crashed airplane

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TCPalm

October 30, 2007

The flight that Vincent "Mark" Molina started in his vintage airplane Wednesday finally ended on dry land last night as Molina and friends and members of a salvage team cheered and clapped.

Working for several hours Monday afternoon, Molina and a professional salvage team headed by Kerry Dillon carefully secured the plane's fuselage and painstakingly hoisted it out of the water at the site of what used to be the Northside Marina west of the Roosevelt Bridge.

It took several hours to tow the plane just under the surface of the water from the site where it crashed Wednesday behind Martin Memorial Medical Center, to a slip in the marina where a crane could lift it to the dock.

It was gently lifted into place on its landing gear. Water and a mixture of oil and grease dripped off the fuselage as Molina examined the cockpit for damage.

It will be placed on a flatbed trailer today and towed to the St. Lucie International Airport in Fort Pierce.

The 1946 Ercoupe 415-C plane lost power about 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, and Molina, 54, of Fort Pierce, and passenger Gary Hirsch, 62, of Port St. Lucie, chose to crash it in the water to avoid injuring others on land.

The plane flipped over when the landing gear hit water, but the men escaped relatively uninjured because it had an open cockpit. A local fisherman picked them up and threw over a crab trap to mark where the plane sank in about 7 feet of water.

On Sunday, the second of the plane's two wings was brought up to make it easier to surface the fuselage.

Despite the dramatic crash and having to foot the bill to salvage his plane, Molina has remained upbeat about the whole experience.

He said Monday he was fortunate to apply extensive corrosion proofing to the aluminum plane a week before the crash. The proofing was meant to protect the plane from the sea air, but it has helped preserve the body and wings underwater.


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US team finds World War II bombers, fighter off Corsica

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Political Gateway
September 20, 2007

CALVI, France - A US military team searching for the remains of American soldiers from World War II has discovered the wreckage of two B-17 bombers and a P-47 fighter plane off the coast of Corsica.

The 13-man team led by Captain George Mitroka conducted seven days of marine searches near the French Mediterranean island, equipped with sonars, radars, cameras and video equipment.

A B-17 bomber that crashed off the coast of Calvi in northern Corsica in February 1944 after a missed landing was found at a site known to local divers for decades.

A second one was discovered near Ajaccio airport at a depth of only 12 metres, said Howard Mariteragi, a member of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, which seeks to account for US soldiers missing from war.

The P-47 fighter plane was discovered off the coast of Bastia after a Corsican diver provided the US team with the exact GPS coordinates of the wreckage.

The US team, which was making its first visit to Corsica, did not recover any remains at the wreckage sites, but plans to return for further searches.

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Divers not giving up quest to explain 1950 plane crash

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freep.com
By James Prichard
July 12, 2007




GRAND RAPIDS -- The quest to locate the Lake Michigan site where an airliner carrying 58 people went down decades ago could help uncover the cause of the mysterious crash, even if the wreckage itself never is found, says the woman leading the search that again failed to find the plane this spring.

"I feel very strongly that it's not so much finding the wreckage that's going to provide the answers. I think we're getting the answers in the course of the search for the plane," Valerie van Heest said Wednesday from her Holland home.

From late April through late May, the diver and her group, Michigan Shipwreck Research Associates, scoured a 23-square-mile area of the lake off South Haven but found no sign of the crash site of Northwest Airlines Flight 2501. They were helped by a three-member underwater-search team provided by author and shipwreck hunter Clive Cussler. The organization started the search in fall 2004.

Van Heest said she is learning a lot from reading courtroom transcripts she obtained from a liability lawsuit that some of the victims' relatives filed years ago against Northwest. She has read about 300 of the 2,500 pages of transcribed testimony from witnesses and crash experts that she believes has information that will be of help during her next search.

The team also conducted searches in spring 2005 and spring 2006 and plans to return to southern Lake Michigan next year.

The flight, a DC4 carrying 55 passengers and three crew members, originated in New York City and was ultimately bound for Seattle. It crashed June 23, 1950, killing all aboard in the nation's deadliest airliner accident up to that time.

The crash happened during a raging thunderstorm but no cause could be determined.


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Search resumes for 1950 sunken plane

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Daily India
May 25, 2006


SOUTH HAVEN, Mich. -- A search has resumed in Lake Michigan for a near-forgotten Northwest Airlines DC-4 that crashed in a storm 56 years ago and took 58 lives.

Underwater archeologists and amateur historians have embarked on a mission to find the wreckage of Flight 2501 in 200 feet of water about 18 miles northwest of Benton Harbor, The Chicago Tribune reported.

On June 23, 1950, 55 passengers and a crew of three took off from New York's LaGuardia Airport bound for Seattle but encountered stormy weather over the lake and crashed.

Body parts, a fuel tank float, blankets, shredded arm rests and small wooden pieces from the 93-foot-long plane were about all that was recovered from Lake Michigan beaches for several days.

The aircraft had no data or voice recorders and an investigation concluded the plane either broke up or the crew lost control in turbulence.

Searchers this week finished scanning the lakebed with high-tech equipment, and divers hope to return to specific sites on Saturday, the newspaper said.

The search is being financed by Clive Cussler, author of underwater adventure fiction that has sold more than 100 million copies.


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Piece Of Navy Jet That Crashed Off Florida Washes Up In Ireland

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News4Jax.com
May 09, 2006


NORFOLK, Va. -- A tail section from a U.S. Navy fighter jet that crashed 3½ years ago off Key West, Fla., has turned up 4,900 miles away on a beach in Ireland.

A retired commercial airline captain, identified by the Irish Examiner newspaper as Charlie Coughlan, discovered the tail piece Friday. The Navy confirmed Tuesday that markings on the section, including squadron insignia and a serial number, pointed to the downed F-14 Tomcat.

Currents from the Gulf of Mexico near the tip of Florida might have floated the nearly 10-foot-long triangular piece of vertical stabilizer, one of two on the plane, to the beach in West Cork on Ireland's southern shore.

The F-14, based in Virginia, crashed near Key West in the Gulf of Mexico on Oct. 3, 2002, during a training mission. Both crew members ejected safely.


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Aviation buff on mission to find lost wreckage

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Billings Gazette
May 01, 2006

POLSON -- Somewhere at the bottom of Flathead Lake not far from Yellow Bay sit the remains of a military jet that crashed more than 40 years ago. John Gisselbrecht is intent on finding them.

Gisselbrecht is with Missoula's Museum of Mountain Flying and is launching an underwater search this week to see if he can pinpoint the wreckage, and possibly the pilot's remains.

Gisselbrecht doesn't want to remove the wreckage, but hopes to locate it, identify it and prevent it from being removed by salvagers in the future.

"We will respect this and treat the site as a grave," he said. "We will not be recovering the pilot or the aircraft."

Capt. John Eaheart of the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve and a combat aviator during the war in Korea, was on a training flight from Los Alamitos Naval Air Station in California when the F9F Cougar fighter and pilot plunged into the lake the evening of March 21, 1960.

Eaheart, 30, had flown to Malmstrom Air Force Base to log training hours, then made a side trip to Missoula where he flew over the homes of his parents and sister -- and then north to Flathead Lake, where the parents of his fiance, Viola Pinkerman lived.

The late K.C. Pinkerman, Viola's father, saw the plane go down from his Blue Bay residence.

Pinkerman provided a good idea of where it crashed. He said it went down about 2 1/2 miles slightly east and north of Matterhorn Point on Wild Horse Island and on a direct line between Matterhorn Point and Blue Bay on the lake's east shore.

Boats and a barge scoured the surface during the days after the crash and found some debris, including Eaheart's aviation helmet with brain tissue inside.

Neither the plane nor its pilot were ever recovered because the lake depth between Wild Horse Island and the east shore exceeds 200 feet, making salvage attempts unfeasible 46 years ago.

Now, that might change.

Gisselbrecht, an aviator from Kalispell, said he's been interested in the fate of the aircraft since 1991. He wants to make sure the pilot and plane rest undisturbed by salvage profiteers and souvenir hunters.

"Technology is changing, and it's more and more likely someone could come in there and scoop that plane out of there and sell it for scrap," he said.

To protect the plane and make sure the body remains undisturbed -- which is also Viola Pinkerman Lewis' wish -- he needs the specific location of the plane and, if possible, the location of Eaheart's remains.

Once he has the information, which he says will remain confidential, he will notify the Montana Historic Preservation Office and the U.S. Department of the Interior's Office of National Registry. Under a federal law called the Antiquities Act, these agencies can protect the site from disturbance.

The cause of the crash has never been determined, at least as far as Gisselbrecht has been able to determine. He made persistent requests for records from both the Air Force and the Marine Corps.


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Korea, US Work Together to Salvage Fighter Jet

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The Korea Times
March 27, 2006


SEOUL (Yonhap) -- The navies of South Korea and the United States are working closely together to salvage an F-16C fighter that crashed in the West Sea earlier this month, the U.S. military here said Monday.
The U.S. Safeguard, which arrived in the southern military port city of Jinhae on March 16 from Japan, will join the operation with South Korea's warship the Pyongtaek for two weeks, the United States Navy Command based here said in a statement.

The U.S. plane is believed to be under about 20 meters of water about 30 kilometers from coastal Kunsan Air Base in North Cholla Province.

On March 14, the plane's American pilot ejected safely and was later flown back to the U.S. base, where he was treated at a medical clinic and released, according to U.S. military officials.

``The Guardian, which is participating in the Foal Eagle exercise, is also helping the salvage operation by calculating the depth of the sea and the position of the underwater object using sound waves,’’ the statement said.

The Safeguard is planning to deliver the wrecked plane to the U.S. mainland. South Korea and the U.S. are engaged in the biggest combined military exercise of the year on the Korean Peninsula starting Saturday.


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Work on Pacific Aviation Museum to start

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Pacific Business News
March 17, 2006

Work on the first phase of the Pacific Aviation Museum on Ford Island at Pearl Harbor is scheduled to begin next week with the groundbreaking and blessing on Tuesday.

The proposed $75-million museum is to be built on 16 acres on the Navy-controlled island, which was at the center of the attack by the Japanese in 1941.

The first phase will involve the construction of the museum in Hangar 37 at a cost of $11 million. The museum is scheduled to open in December.

About $13 million has been raised so far, a combination of individual and corporate donations and money from the federal and state governments.

The project is envisioned as a complement to existing historical attractions at Pearl Harbor, including the USS Arizona Memorial and the USS Missouri.

The aviation museum will ultimately include displays of aircraft in several restored hangars, the renovation of the distinctive 1930s-era control tower and the preservation of the battle scars that remain on the runways and buildings six decades after the attack.


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Restrictions Eased on Historic B-29 Lake Mead Crash Site

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KVBC

March 02, 2006

It's an interesting piece of Southern Nevada History, but no one is allowed to see it. At least until now. But the National Park Service is getting ready to make this artifact available to at least some people.

The plane crashed into the Overton arm of Lake Mead in 1948, and wasn't rediscovered until 53 years later. Since then, it's been closed to the public. Of course, most of the public wouldn't be able to get to it anyhow. This plane is way down there...almost 200 feet.

Ghostly images on a TV screen are all most will ever see of this B-29 superfortess, which went down while doing cold war research.

Russ Green is with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and is controlling a VideoRay Remote Operational Vehicle (ROV).

"We're looking at an oxygen cylinder...there's several aboard and airplane...that the pilot and crew could breathe oxygen at higher elevations. This one just happened to fall out from the rear of the plane," narrates Green, glancing at the screen.

The crew escaped alive, but the plane has been there ever since. And the National Park Service doesn't want to see that change.

"Removing the plane from where it is now would dramatically effect its prospects for the future," explains NPS Archeologist Dave Conlin. "And it would radically increase its corrosion and decay rate. So we weren't convinced it was in the best interests of that particular resource to bring it up."

Even without NPS protection, this site is out of reach for amateur divers. The members of the NPS Submerged Cultural Resources Unit use advanced "rebreathers" instead of standard dive tanks. And have to have a recompression chamber on hand just in case--heaven forbid--someone was to get the bends.

"There's a kind of a gurney in there with handles and a pull rope." says NPS Photographer Brett Seymour. "You'd slide the person in. Put the two ends in. Get a seal and recompress."

From there, the chamber is airlifted to Las Vegas. Luckily, it's never been used. But clearly, visiting the B-29 isn't for everyone.

"The depth here is not that deep for a technical dive," according to Seymour. "But what we're looking at is the conditions. The darkness, the silt. You know, there's a lot of things going on here that make this a challenging dive."

For those who are part of the team, it's a special experience.

"Well you know the whole thing is the sense of history you get. Being able to see what's down there," smiles Diving Consultant Jeff Bozanic, as he emerges from the water.

The National Park Service is now planning to open the restricted waters to qualified divers. For others, it will be video feeds, informational packets and lectures, delivered to schools and the general public.

"We have a dual mandate," says Conlin. "One is to provide recreational opportunities for the American public, but also to preserve cultural and historical resources for future generations. And so striking a balance between that is a difficult thing."

NPS officials haven't yet set a firm date on when the plane will be reopened to technical divers. For now, there is a fine for diving in the area...or even docking your boat there.

Photography by Brett Seymour, National Park Service

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Civil War submarines, World War II bomber remain elusive prey

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The Shreveport Times
By John Andrew Prime
March 01, 2006


Civil War submarines known to once be in Shreveport but unseen since that conflict continue to elude searchers.

"The submarines look like they will stay an enigma for a while," said Ralph Wilbanks, the diver who led underwater efforts that found the Confederate submersible Hunley off Charleston Harbor in 1995. "We have looked in the bayou and we didn't see anything we didn't see last time."

Wilbanks, together with fellow Hunley discoverer Harry Pecorelli III and diver Darrell Taylor, has spent the last week in Shreveport, dragging side-scan sonars and magnetometers in countless lanes on mapped grids on the Red River, Cross Bayou and Cross Lake, looking for nagging mysteries from the Civil War to World War II. They may wind up their dives today.

As with Wilbanks' first visit to Shreveport in 1999, the current survey was underwritten by best-selling author Clive Cussler and his nonprofit, volunteer National Underwater and Marine Agency. Cussler said his decision to send Wilbanks and his crew back to Shreveport was based on "new data where the river changed course ... Apparently nothing was found again."

Wilbanks thinks the submarines were abandoned and salvaged after the Civil War.

"I think it's reasonable to think they may have just melted (them) back down and made steel out of (them)," he said.

Wilbanks and his crew also made scanning runs over the site of the suspected grave of the Civil War warship Grand Duke, out in the middle of Red River just north of Cross Bayou.

They got some hits there. That was where Pecorelli dove Tuesday. Results were inconclusive, with the sources of strong magnetometer readings under tree stumps and driftwood.

"There are some targets in the river and some very strong targets on the Bossier side," said Shreveport cartographer and historian Gary Joiner, whose Blanchard Place office has been the divers' nerve center this visit. "Some of the targets in the river are currently protruding above the channel floor a few feet. The Bossier side is currently very shallow in this area and we could not get the instruments near it."

While here, Wilbanks decided to spend a few days scanning Cross Lake to try to find a World War II B-26 bomber long rumored to have belly-landed and sunk into the muck.

"We decided, since we were coming all the way out here, we'd look for this plane, too," Wilbanks said.

While the Red River work took up most of Thursday and Tuesday, Sunday and Monday were spent running scores of tracks up and down the lake, searching but not finding.

"Finding what you're looking for, that's the most exciting part," said Pecorelli. He's worked with Wilbanks since the mid-1990s.

"Most of the time you find out where things aren't," Wilbanks said. "You very seldom find where things are. The other thing is, you either find it in the first lane or the last lane."

Precedent has shown that these historic treasures do exist and are just waiting to be found.

Several decades ago, a fisherman on the Red River noticed something sticking out of a crumbling bluff. It turned out to be a dugout canoe, several millennia old, and one of the area's richest historical finds.

Known wrecks of Civil War-era vessels include the transport Kentucky, just south of LSU-Shreveport, and the Union ironclad Eastport, near Montgomery.

Friday morning was spent crunching Thursday's data.

Wilbanks and Pecorelli gazed intently at sonar runs through the day, pieced pictures together to present a full view of the targeted river and bayou areas, and correlated these to the magnetometer survey results. At one point the team used seven computers and a plotter to examine the data. The afternoon was spent visiting people and places that might be helpful in the search, including the Cross Lake Patrol, Lowe-McFarlane American Legion Post 14 on the lake, and conferring with Shreveport police Sgt. Mike Day, who once worked with the SPD dive team and knew a B-26 pilot who remembered the bomber.

"Monday, we went back out on the lake and looked at a couple of other areas for the plane," Wilbanks said Tuesday. "We found some cable and potentially an old house site. We surveyed all the areas around Squirrel Point, the area most associated with the airplane, and found nothing."

Monday, Joiner learned from fellow historian Eric Brock that a photograph in a local archive shows the plane silhouetted in the lake. Joiner plans to search for the photo today, and if found, the divers may return to the lake. Otherwise, they'll head back to South Carolina.

Tuesday, Wilbanks said, "we went back to the Red River and dived on three sonar targets. They were like log jams. So we did a little more magnetometer work and sonar work and ruled those out."

Even though the survey didn't turn up the subs or the airplane, it has increased the store of knowledge of the Red River and its tributaries.

For years, Joiner has thought the submarines might have been scuttled in an area near the old Battery Walker, which is now under dry land at what Bossier City calls Cane's Landing. Using ground-penetrating radar might be the next step here, he said, but that area was used as a dump for many years, and items from the intervening 14 decades would shield the Civil War material from detection.

These searches are tremendously important in terms of adding to the store of history, Joiner said.

"We are practicing forensic history. We are using the best technology available today in this research. We are working with some of the best known researchers in the world ... . Shreveport is, at this time, one of the focal points for this advanced research because it was important during the Civil War and the research and development then might exist today. If found, these artifacts will be profoundly important for scholars."

Related link: Visit Clive Cussler's underwater search site, http://www.numa.net/.


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www.dofundodomar.blogspot.com
www.schnorkel.blogspot.com
www.airplanes-underwater.blogspot.com

Broken Wings

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Underwater Aviation Archaeology

This site is intended as a resource dedicated to the exploration, discovery, documentation, conservation and presentation of heritage (eg, recently discovered, and WW2) aircraft crash sites worldwide. It has a number of facets, for example:

• submerged aviation archaeology (hence the involvement of WAMM)

• conservation

• in-situ preservation

• Partial or total recovery

• Exhibits

• Technical research

• Publication.


The site is aimed at anyone who's desire it is to accurately record, preserve, or present their findings for the benefit of the sites, their stories, the people involved, their relatives and for the future.

This site and its many links to other sites might also serve as a resource that could lead to the study of crashed heritage aircraft becoming recognised as a bonafide heritage or archaeological endeavour. It could also provide links to those who might be able to assist with experiences, new ideas, expertise or other contacts.

Contributors can either have an electronic link to their own site, or they can present their project or finds on this site where it will be viewed by an international audience. Their conclusions, methodology, etc can then be presented for the benefit of others invoved, to add to the body of knowledge and to publicize their work.

Should they wish to, contributors could also seek to obtain feedback from professional, historical and academic bodies and from experienced avocational practitioners who are linked here (ie, capable, independent searchers, researchers, conservators and restorers).

It is not an aim of this site to prescribe method, to criticise, or in any way seek to regulate activities. It is however hoped that the site may assist in the development of a free exchange such that the diminishing archaelogical resource is better managed.

They are also not going to forget the human element: A single aircraft crashing in some remote part of the world is more than thesum parts of its scattered and twisted wreckage. Its journey from assembly to operations, to its final resting place, may well have involved and affected hundreds of people in apparently un-related and fragmented areas, not forgetting emotional attachments thatcan hold for a lifetime where tragedy occurs.

It is our wish, in developing this site and making it readily availablein an un-biased manner, that contributor's, discoveries, research and stories may help unite many of these disparate elements - search, research, discovery, documention, preservation and presentation about the aircraft, the sites, the exhibitions, the reports and people.

Please follow the menu prompts to navigate your way through the site. They hope that you enjoy it and look forward to your contributions.

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www.airplanes-underwater.blogspot.com

Crashed US jet likely obliterated

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ABC News Online
January 30, 2006

A Queensland Maritime Museum spokesman says not much would be left of a US fighter jet that crashed into the sea off the coast of Queensland on Saturday.

The FA-18 was attempting to land on the flight deck of the USS Ronald Reagan during a training exercise early yesterday morning about 200 kilometres south-east of Brisbane.

The pilot ejected safely but the $27 million aircraft was lost. The pilot was rescued from the sea.

Museum chief executive Ian Jempson says a search for a crashed F111 off the coast of Nowra in New South Wales in the 1980s found only wreckage the size of dinner plates.

He also says the weekend's accident would have occurred over extremely deep water.

"The continental shelf off the east coast of Australia, particularly from Brisbane down to New South Wales, is only in places about 50 miles [80 kilometres] off the coast, so I would assume this aircraft carrier was operating well to sea because of their need for plenty of air space," Mr Jempson said.

The USS Ronald Reagan is the world's largest aircraft carrier. It left Brisbane on Friday after a five-day visit.

Lieutenant Commander Ross from the US Navy says that when the crash happened, five other jets were forced to fly in to Brisbane because they were short on fuel.

"There were five aircraft that were sent into Brisbane International Airport. The reason why they went into Brisbane was because of their fuel state," he said.

The US Navy is investigating the accident.

"It should be noted that there was no damage or impact in the operational capability of the USS Ronald Reagan during the incident," Lieutenant Commander Ross said.

Environment
The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) wants the Navy to explain why it might not salvage the jet.

ACF spokesman Chris Smyth says there need to be good reasons why the wreck may be left where it is.

"What we would need to find out is more details about the depth of water and the sorts of logistics that would be required to get the plane out of there and how much fuel is on board," he said.

"We just don't know any of those things. We would hope the US Navy would give us very good information about that, as to why or why they can't get the plane back up to the surface and taken away."

Meanwhile, the Sunshine Coast Environment Council says bags of rubbish apparently from the aircraft carrier have been found in the ocean off the Queensland coast.

Another bag of rubbish was found on the beach at Mudjimba this morning.

Scott Alderson from the Environment Council says he fears the US Navy has treated Australian waters with contempt.

"We're pretty disappointed that the American Navy would treat Australian waters with contempt," he said.

"If that's the sort of attitude, it would give me great fears that we've got a nuclear ship with nuclear capability that has no real responsibility for their own rubbish."

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www.airplanes-underwater.blogspot.com

US jet crashes off Queensland

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ABC News Online
January 30, 2005




United States officials have confirmed an FA-18 Hornet strike fighter plane has ditched into the sea while attempting a night landing near Brisbane.

The aircraft was attempting to land on the flight deck of the USS Ronald Reagan during a training exercise early yesterday morning about 120 nautical miles south-east of Brisbane.

Lieutenant Commander Gary Ross says the pilot ejected safely but the $37 million aircraft was lost. The pilot was rescued from the sea.

Lieutenant Commander Ross says five other jets were forced to fly in to Brisbane because they were short on fuel.

"There were five aircraft that were sent into Brisbane International Airport. The reason why they went into Brisbane was because of their fuel state," he said.

The USS Ronald Reagan is the world's largest aircraft carrier. It left Brisbane on Friday after a five-day visit.

"It should be noted that there was no damage or impact in the operational capability of the USS Ronald Reagan during the incident," Lieutenant Commander Ross said.

The US Navy is investigating the accident.


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www.airplanes-underwater.blogspot.com

B.C. divers sink Boeing 737 as artificial reef

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CDNN
January 14, 2006



CHEMAINUS, British Columbia -- A Boeing 737 made its final descent on Saturday – 20 metres deep into the waters off the east coast of Vancouver Island.

Cranes slowly lowered the decommissioned plane into the ocean off Chemainus, about 70 kilometres north of Victoria, slightly more than a month after Environment Canada gave final approval to a plan dreamed up by diving fans.

The Artificial Reef Society of B.C. sunk the plane to create an artificial reef in an area that doesn't have much marine life.

The society expects the new reef to be home to dozens of species of sea life within a couple of years, which it hopes will, in turn, lure more divers.

Boaters were on hand to watch the lowering of the plane, a 1970s-era Boeing that had not flown since 2001.

The plane, which had been stripped down, weighs 15 tonnes and measures 30 metres long.
It was to be placed on 4.5-metre high stands on the ocean bottom so divers could swim under it.

The diving society, which began work on the project in 2002, has used ships to create six other artificial reefs in the province.

For the latest project, it received approval from six local First Nations groups as well as Environment Canada.

The group said the plane's resting place was chosen for its lack of sea life, blaming a century of forest-industry debris.


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www.artificial-reefs.blogspot.com
www.airplanes-underwater.blogspot.com

Diver finds warplane wreck

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News.com.au
By Jade Bilowol
December 21, 2005

A MYSTERY warplane wreck has been found in a watery grave off the tip of far north Queensland.

Diver and underwater filmmaker Ben Cropp today said he discovered the wreck under 6m of water "about half a mile" off the tip of Cape York last month.

The wreck, that took up to 10 passengers to their deaths during World War II, was either an B24 Liberator bomber, a B17 Fortress or even a Japanese Emily flying boat, Mr Cropp said.

Mr Cropp said he was determined return to the site, near Albany Passage, next year to unravel the mystery.

"It's intriguing – there were no survivors, unless it was a Japanese plane and they would want to sneak away," Mr Cropp said.

"I'll identify it by counting the pistons, and they should still be intact, or by finding the name of the engine on the cowling."

He found the wing tip and three engines of the war plane, as well as its coral-covered fuselage, while filming the documentary The Silent Warriors.

"It is a huge, huge bomber – it has a wing span of more than 30m," he said.

"I would say it is the largest plane to crash in Australia. There would be others of the same size but there hasn't been a larger one to crash on land or in the sea here."

However, he doubted any human remains would be recovered from the wreck.

"The sea just eats up everything," Mr Cropp said.

He said the discovery was one of 231 warplane wrecks that crashed in the far north Queensland region during World War II.

Mr Cropp believed the plane crashed because it ran out of fuel.


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www.airplanes-underwater.blogspot.com

Lost Patrol might not have lived up to name with today's technology

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The State
By Robert Nolin
December 04, 2005

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - Sixty years ago Monday, 14 men in five Navy planes took off from Fort Lauderdale on a routine practice mission. Then the "Lost Patrol" vanished into mystery - and the myth of the Bermuda Triangle.

Aviation experts and historians figure Flight 19 soared off course, perhaps due to a malfunction in old-fangled navigational equipment, and ditched in the Atlantic.

"I don't know where we are," the commander radioed at one point.

But with today's sophisticated aviation technology, it's unlikely the Lost Patrol would ever have lived up to its name. Aids like the Global Positioning System make it nearly impossible for aviators to steer astray.

"There's no excuse to get lost," aviation consultant Bob Baron said from his Savannah office. "You have to purposely try."

Flight 19, consisting of five, single-engine Avenger torpedo bombers, rumbled out of what is now Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on the afternoon of Dec. 5, 1945. The squadron was to fly to a bombing range in the Bahamas, then continue on a triangular path back to base.

Within 90 minutes, flight commander Lt. Charles C. Taylor reported compass trouble. Taylor thought he was over the Keys, and directed the gunmetal blue planes northeast, toward what he thought was the Florida Peninsula. Based on radio transmissions, investigators think the aircraft flew far out to sea, then west toward land, crashing before reaching Florida's East Coast.

One of aviation's greatest mysteries deepened later that night, when a seaplane searching for the doomed flight also crashed, killing 13. A total of 27 men were lost for what Navy investigators later labeled "causes unknown."

But theorists on the Bermuda Triangle, which stretches from Fort Lauderdale to Bermuda to Puerto Rico, have a smorgasbord of causes why the Lost Patrol, and other vessels and aircraft, vanish there: Interdimensional wormholes, the lost continent of Atlantis, electromagnetic windstorms, time portals, military experimentation, lunar gravitation, alien kidnapping.

Other observers - either less imaginative or less starry-eyed, depending on your point of view - simply see the triangle's peculiar disappearances as resulting from high air and sea traffic in an area notorious for unpredictable storms and unforgiving seas.

Baron speculated the planes' compasses could have gone haywire because of electromagnetic activity, the "chaff" that sometimes shows up on radar screens.

And the compass was the main navigation tool in those days. Flight 19's pilots relied solely on it and dead reckoning - determining position by calculating distance, speed and time. "Pilotage," or looking out the window and studying landmarks, was also common.

"It's a very crude way of navigating," Navy Cmdr. Pat Buckley, an expert on aviation technology, said from his base at Patuxent River, Md.

"It just amazes me to think they could go out on a mission to some remote island and turn around and go back and find an aircraft carrier or a flotilla of ships using the navigation that existed at the time," said Walt Houghton, 64, assistant to the director of aviation at Fort Lauderdale's airport.

Scant years after Flight 19 winged into legend, navigation technology took a baby step forward with non-directional beacons. A pilot could adjust course by tuning to a radio signal that would rotate his compass card in the direction of the signal. The '50s brought a more sophisticated version, the VOR, or VHF omnidirectional range system. That instrument also homed into radio signals, even standard AM ones, and displayed arrows for the pilot to set course.

Later came LORAN, the long-range navigation system. Also radio based, it is used by pilots to determine position by tracking signals from two or more ground-based stations. Trouble was, the system was of little use to cross-country aviation, since LORAN was mainly used by ships and its stations were along the coast.

The real sea change in navigation came with the advent of GPS, a system created and owned by the U.S. Defense Department, which became fully operational in 1995. Pilots seized on the system, which uses satellites to pinpoint one's position to within feet.

Today GPS receivers are common among hikers, boaters, motorists and especially aviators. "It's easy to use - just hit the `Where the hell am I?' button," said Alan Rifkin, who from his Hadley, Mass., home operates a Web site that tracks interesting GPS landmarks.

"You can go anywhere in the world without getting lost," said Houghton.

Had Flight 19 been equipped with current technology, there would never be a monument to its passing at the Fort Lauderdale airport - and the myth of the Bermuda Triangle would have lost much of its oomph.

"With all the navigational systems we have aboard our aircraft today, I can't imagine ever being in a position where I didn't know where I was," said the Navy's Buckley.

But all that high-tech wizardry still requires one essential element: A human to tell it what to do. And humans are ever prone to mistakes.

"There's a lot of examples where people fly for years and years and one day they forget to do something," Baron said, "and that's what gets them in trouble."


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www.airplanes-underwater.blogspot.com

Science Trumps Lore In Secrets

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SciFi.com
November 23, 2005

Nautical researcher David Bright, whose efforts to find an infamous missing plane in the Bermuda Triangle are chronicled in the upcoming SCI FI Channel investigative news special The Bermuda Triangle: Startling New Secrets, told SCI FI Wire that he did not go into the project with any preconceived notions about what he would or would not find. "Absolutely not," Bright said in an interview. "I think the beauty of what we were doing is because we all had varying backgrounds on the project. They all came into play. What we did is before we even went out we did a bit of what we call 'What if?' scenarios. So in order to get to that point, what we really needed to do was to essentially do an awful lot of research."

The special documents Bright's expedition—which included a team of more than 20 scientists and technological experts—as they searched for the truth behind the Bermuda Triangle's most famous incidents. In 1945, a squadron of bombers called Flight 19 was lost during a training mission off the coast of Florida. The rescue plane sent to find them a few hours later also disappeared. None of the planes has ever been found.

Based on all the scientific data currently available, Bright and his team used a methodical approach to finding the missing search plane. "We built in a scenario, or a search pattern, that was predicated on currents and tides and weather and taking also into account the fact that there could be certain scenarios where the ship exploded in midair and pieces would come down," Bright said. "Or the ship exploded as it hit the water after it came down. Or the fact that it may have hit the water and parts of it could have essentially blown up, but yet the remainder part of it could have gone on a little further with the tides. ... We came up with all these different scenarios and then developed search pattens based upon all of the different scenarios."

Bright would not reveal what his team uncovered during their seven days at sea, but he did say that he came away from the project satisfied. "What we were doing scientifically, especially with the game plan, was very strategically aligned with what we expected to see," he said. "And it actually worked out quite well for us. So, although I can't tell you what we found, I can tell you we were very excited about the science that we did out there, and that none of us would have done anything differently."

The Bermuda Triangle: Startling New Secrets airs Nov. 27 at 9 p.m. PT/ET. The special, from NBC News Productions, is hosted by NBC/MSNBC news anchor Lester Holt.


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www.airplanes-underwater.blogspot.com

Lake Mead's sunken treasures to be protected from scuba diving thieves

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CDNN
By Chuck Frederick
November 16, 2005

Archaeologists and historial preservation groups worldwide are struggling to protect wrecks from infamous shipwreck looters such as Brad Sheard and Leigh Bishop who boast about their private collections of artifacts they claim to have "legally" stolen from shipwrecks around the world.

LAS VEGAS, Nevada -- The National Park Service is drafting a plan to protect cultural resources submerged below Lake Mead and public access to the often hidden treasures.
"We're talking about hundreds of sites that might be of interest to someone," said Dan Lenihan, who helped found the National Park Service's Submerged Resources Center in Santa Fe, N.M.

As water levels receded in recent years because of drought, some sites swallowed when Hoover Dam was constructed six decades ago are now in shallow water - or soon could be.

Others are above the surface, including an old cement tank in the Boulder Basin left over from the construction of the dam, and the abandoned St. Thomas town site near the lake's northern tip.


The cockpit of the B-29 bomber at the bottom of Lake Mead.
Divers in the area who want to see the wreck protected are
concerned it could be further damaged by scuba diving looters
who steal artifacts for private collections, bragging rights and
profits from eBay sales.

"They're physical touchstones to the past," said Lenihan, who retired in 2000 but still works part time with the Park Service's archaeological dive team.

Of the three options being considered for Lake Mead, park officials prefer the one that calls for managed recreational use and access to submerged sites.

The other options are unrestricted access to all sites, or making all sites off-limits to underwater explorers unless they are accompanied by a Park Service employee.

Dive shop owner Jay Gundy said he thinks most local divers will agree with the agency's preference.

"We certainly don't want to see them closed, but if you don't have managed access, the sites will be gone. It's been proven time and time again," Gundy said. "We like having that stuff down there. It's a reason to get in the lake."

The management plan evolved from a legal battle over a B-29 bomber that crashed and sank in Lake Mead's Overton Arm in 1948.

A federal court awarded the Park Service custody of the wreckage earlier this year, but the bomber has been looted and damaged in the five years since it was found, even though it is too deep to be reached by all but a small fraction of divers.


Inspecting engine #1, the only one still
attached to the plane.

Gundy, who has conducted about 350 dives in Lake Mead over the past 12 years, said many of the lake's sunken treasures can only be reached by "technical divers" who are trained and equipped to use mixed gases that allow them to descend below 130 feet.

"A lot of the history that's at the bottom of Lake Mead is along the old channel of the Colorado River, and those are the deepest parts of the lake," he said. "They're at 200 feet or better, well below the reach of a recreational diver."

Eventually, though, some of those sites could be within the reach of even the most casual divers, should the lake continue to shrink, Gundy said.

Public comments on the Park Service proposal will be accepted through Dec. 15. Officials said they hope to have a final management strategy in place by next spring.


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www.airplanes-underwater.blogspot.com

Bomber wreckage beckons divers

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Review-Journal
By Henry Brean
October 10, 2005

National Park Service tries to protect B-29 from plundering, damage while still allowing access
After two years of litigation, the National Park Service has won its custody fight for a B-29 bomber that crashed and sank to the bottom of Lake Mead's Overton Arm in 1948.

Now the man who discovered the wreckage is calling on the agency's officials to do more to protect the aircraft before it is carted off or destroyed by unscrupulous divers.

Already, parts have been plundered and damage done to the B-29, said Gregg Mikolasek, the one-time Henderson dive instructor who led the team that found the wreckage in 2001.

"It's very discouraging," said Mikolasek, who returned to the aircraft during a dive permitted by the agency in May. "This wreck was pristine when we left it in 2002."

The service has launched an investigation into the damage and who might have caused it, said Roxanne Dey, spokeswoman for Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

"We will aggressively prosecute the people who are responsible. It's a priority for us," she said.

In the meantime, Dey said, park officials are working with "the local dive community" to brainstorm ways to better protect the sunken bomber.

The remote site poses a challenge for the agency, which lacks the resources to post someone there all of the time.

Dey said park officials rely on help from boaters, divers and other visitors to report any suspicious activity in the area.

To make that work, however, the park has marked a wide zone around the wreckage with buoys so visitors know where to look.

Some argue the buoys needlessly draw attention to the B-29.

Others argue that those who are plundering the wreck already know where it is, and the only way to stop them is to catch them in the act.

"I feel we're doing as much as humanly possible," Dey said. "We can't be there every minute of every day, and unfortunately there is a segment of the population that will engage in this kind of activity."

The agency currently prohibits diving and the use of anchors in a 14-square-mile area around the bomber without permission from the chief ranger for the park. That could change now that the court battle over the B-29 has ended.

In 2003, U.S. District Judge Kent Dawson blocked California-based Historical Aircraft Recovery Corp. from salvaging the bomber. Dawson ruled that the Park Service had not abandoned the wreckage.

Dawson's decision left the door open for the company to seek a "salvage award" from the federal government as compensation for finding the aircraft and "contributing to its rescue."

No financial reimbursement was ever sought by the company, and in May the judge granted a government motion to close the case. That move became official in mid-August when the deadline for appeal came and went.

"I don't have any intention of pursuing it any further," said Mikolasek, who transferred his rights to the wreckage to Historical Aircraft Recovery Corp. and had no direct involvement in the custody fight.

"I just hope the management will improve to actually preserve the site ... and allow for future exploration by responsible divers," Mikolasek said.

Recreation Area Superintendant William K. Dickinson promised as much in a statement released by the park a week ago.

"Now that the court case is over, we will continue to meet with members of the local dive community to work collaboratively on a management plan that will allow the public to experience the site while protecting it for future generations as part of a comprehensive site stewardship plan," Dickinson said in the statement.

"We are moving forward to open the site to permitted diving as soon as possible."

On July 21, 1948, the B-29 Superfortress crashed while on a high-altitude, atmospheric research mission.

Three of the four engines tore off when the 99-foot aircraft hit the water and skipped like a stone for more than a quarter of a mile.

The plane's pilot, Capt. Robert Madison, scientist John Simeroth and three others escaped through cockpit hatches as the B-29 submerged in 12 minutes.

The aircraft was lost in the cold, dark water of the lake until a team of local divers found it again in 2001.

Barring an enormous drop in the water level at Lake Mead, the B-29 should remain out of reach of recreational divers.

It currently rests in about 170 feet of open water.

"It's still an advanced dive," Mikolasek said. "It can best be described as cold, dark, deep and scary."

Dey said that is exactly why permits will be required once the service opens the wreck to diving: to make sure those allowed to explore the wreck are qualified to do so.

Dey said there also has been talk of building a floating dive platform above the aircraft.

Now the plan calls for the installation of moorings at the site, however, so boats have something to tie onto during dive operations.

Park officials could not say when the moorings might be built or the first permits issued to divers wanting to explore the wreckage.

Dey hopes it happens soon.

"We get several requests a week from people who want to dive the B-29," she said.

"The park service doesn't like to keep people away from resources. But we want to make sure we have a plan in place for stewardship of the B-29 first."


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www.airplanes-underwater.blogspot.com

B-25 WWII plane retrieved from depths of Lake Murray

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Columbia Star
By Bill Vartorella
September 16, 2005


A model of the B-25 was created to assist
in the recovery.

Sixty–two years after plunging into Lake Murray, one of the last remaining Army Air Corps war planes has been rescued from 150 feet beneath the lake’s surface.

According to the expedition’s leader, Dr. Robert Seigler, the retrieval of the now rare B–25C bomber took several days. Divers worked on mixed gases, at depth, to attach special straps on the aircraft.

The technical team is being led by internationally–known aviation salver, Gary Larkins, who expects the entire operation (which includes the spray–down and disassembly of the aircraft) to take about two weeks. Larkins disassembled, rigged, and raised a P–38 Lightning from beneath 270 feet of a Greenland ice cap several years ago. He is regarded as the premier salver of historic airplanes, with some 68 to his credit worldwide.

Seigler, who has written a history of the Lake Murray B–25s for Warbirds International , has spent two decades researching, locating, videotaping, and securing sidescan radar images of the aircraft. Divers have been quietly examining and documenting the airplane for the past several years in preparation for the retrieval.

The final day of the airplane is well–known. After flying out of the Columbia Army Air Base on April 4, 1943, the now–rare B–25C Bomber crashed and sank in the man–made lake during a skip–bombing training mission. The military crew escaped the aircraft, which had lost power, and brought it to rest upright, with damage to only the right engine. The crew survived and were rescued.

The US Army Air Corps was unable to salvage the aircraft during WWII because of water depth. It was finally located in 1990, virtually intact, under silt.

During the past decade, Seigler, head of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Greenville Hospital System, and John Adams Hodge, an aviation and environmental attorney at Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd, P.A. in Columbia, have dedicated time, energy, and resources to the effort.

William “Bill” Vartorella, Ph.D. of Camden has helped guide the project. His firm, Craig and Vartorella, Inc. has been involved in exotic projects worldwide in the fields of archaeology, motor sports, and history.

The Seigler–Hodge– Vartorella team has continuously sought support in SC and the region from philanthropic foundations, state legislators, museum and airport officials, and corporations as they searched for a permanent site to house the vintage plane.

However, no SC venues were prepared to preserve such an aircraft in an indoor setting that met the need for painstaking restoration and ongoing public interpretation.

The project has received recognition by The Explorers Club and is designated as an Explorers Flag Expedition. The Explorers Club flag will be flown at the site. Seigler, Hodge, and Vartorella are members of the Greater Piedmont Chapter of the Explorers Club. Vartorella is a past chair of the club.

With a commitment to keeping the airplane in the South, Seigler’s nonprofit Lake Murray B–25 Rescue Project (501–c–3) has found an appropriate home for the airplane at the Southern Museum of Flight in Birmingham, Alabama. There, the plane will be restored, conserved, and displayed in its public museum.

Hodge, an attorney, registered geologist, and airline pilot, and Seigler and Vartorella have collaborated with SCE&G, the SC Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, the US military, historians, and numerous others to prepare for the final stages of this quest.

The upcoming retrieval has not been announced previously due to curiosity–seekers who might disturb the plane’s safe resting area.

The heroism of the pilot, who is deceased, prevented the aircraft’s loss of life. One of the crewmen who escaped is still alive and lives on the West Coast. Due to his health, he may not be able to attend; however, his family may send a representative.

Hodge said, “This is about preserving our history and heritage. The aircraft is WWII authentic as it has only been seen by a handful of people since it sank more than 60 years ago. It is in incredibly good shape. Dr. Seigler has expended countless hours and dollars to preserve our history, and I hope South Carolinians will assist him in this noble project.”

According to Vartorella, donations and in–kind contributions to help defray the estimated retrieval costs of $150,000 are appreciated. “We’ve had some excellent past support from the Arcadia Foundation, and companies such as Boozer Lumber have stepped up recently, as well as anonymous individual donors,” he said. “This project is likely to get global coverage and this is an excellent opportunity for companies and individuals to let the world know that SC is committed to its heritage and, frankly, is a great place to live and do business.”

For additional information, contact the nonprofit Lake Murray B–25 Rescue Project, 106 Highland Drive, Greenville, SC 29605 or Bill Vartorella at (803) 432–4353.


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www.airplanes-underwater.blogspot.com

Sunken Navy plane found after 60 years in Clear Lake

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Kesq.com
September 02, 2005

NEWELL, Calif. - A dive team has found a Navy plane that crashed into Clear Lake more than 60 years ago.

After a search that lasted for two years, several pieces of the torpedo bomber from World War-Two were pulled from the lake Wednesday.

The T-B-F-One Avenger crashed into Clear Lake during a training mission in December of 1944, killing the pilot and radioman on board.

The cause of the crash was never determined.

During the search, crews combed the area where witnesses to the crash said the plane had sunk and located a debris field that's about two-thousand feet wide.

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Divers Recover Plane That Crashed in 1958

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AP Wire
August 13, 2005

Divers on Saturday recovered a single engine military plane that crashed into Green Lake during fog nearly 47 years ago, killing a Minnesota National Guard pilot.

More than 50 boats filled with curious spectators circled the site where the recovery operation was taking place, and dozens of people lined the shoreline nearly a mile way for the chance to watch as the Cessna L-19 "Birddog" was pulled from water 40 feet deep.

The daylong recovery effort included volunteers with the Kandiyohi County dive team, Emergency Support Services Association and the Midwest Technical Rescue Training Association, both of Minneapolis.

"Actually, things went excellent," said Mike Roe, recently retired water patrol director with the Kandiyohi County Sheriff's office who oversaw the operations.

Divers used a large winch mounted on a pontoon boat to hoist the airplane from the bottom. They kept the aircraft submerged below a second pontoon boat which they used to tow it to shore.

The crash on Oct. 14, 1958, took the life of Captain Richard P. Carey, 36, who was returning to the Willmar airfield from Rochester when his plane went down at 12:30 a.m.

Along with recovering the plane, divers were able to retrieve some of the items carried by Carey, along with the flight log, parachutes and headphones.

Carey had been in radio contact with the Willmar air field and warned about the foggy conditions, but said he was low on fuel and needed to land.

In his last radio call, he reported that he hit something, later believed to have been seagulls. His body was recovered 13 days later.

After that, countless unsuccessful searches for the plane were made. The plane was discovered by accident on July 4, 2004 by Corey Fladeboe of Willmar and Brett Almquist of Maple Lake as they scanned the bottom with an underwater camera is search of walleyes.

The Spicer American Legion Post and the City of Spicer are planning to restore the airplane and place it on permanent display as a memorial to its pilot and all of those who have served in the Armed Forces, said Spicer Mayor Bill Taylor.


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Ghost Ship

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Monterey County Weekly
By Ryan Masters
August 04, 2005


Macon History: Unfortunately, the legacy of the USS Macon
and its rigid airship siblings is one of disaster and tragedy.
Monterey History and Art Association.

More than a half a century ago, the US’s largest dirigible sunk off the Big Sur coast. In the fall, researchers will attempt to photograph the wreck.

“SOS—falling,” the radioman coolly typed.

Without a sound, the great airship fell slowly out of the clouds and towards the cold green sea and jagged cliffs of Big Sur.

“Let go all ballast and ship tanks aft of midships,” Lt. Cmdr. Herbert V. Wiley ordered from the control car, which hung beneath the dirigible’s huge helium-filled belly. “Slow all engines.”

Most of the crew’s 83 officers and men scrambled through the 785-foot silver air cruiser’s internal cavern of girders, cables and catwalks, dumping fuel and ballast, and preparing for the worst.

Commander Wiley glanced down at the white-capped sea below, where a wave of unpleasant memories surfaced. He forced himself to focus. The ship’s tail was still sinking towards the ocean, but now the vessel seemed to be gathering altitude thanks to the quick work of his men.

Perhaps they would still be able to limp back to the barn at Moffett Field, near Mountain View, after all.

A whistle sounded in the voice tube and Wiley’s right-hand man, Lt. E.K. Van Swearingen, retrieved the message. It was a full damage report. The top stabilizing fin had been completely torn free—only the rudder was standing now. As a result, the number one cell was deflated and numbers zero and two were rapidly following suit.

Wiley knew it was the end. The USS Macon, the nation’s largest rigid airship, was doomed.He ordered the vessel to be turned away from the sharp marine terraces of Big Sur and out to sea, towards the rescue ships that were closing in on his distress signals. Despite his tragic history, he was going to opt for the water landing.

Two years earlier, in 1933, Wiley had been serving aboard the USS Akron when the rigid dirigible had crashed in a storm off the New Jersey coast. The disaster had killed 78 of 81 men, including Admiral William Moffett, the father of Naval aviation. The only surviving officer of the Akron, Wiley was determined to avoid a similar tragedy by performing a controlled crash into the sea.

He ordered the crew to begin preparing to abandon ship. Throughout the mortally-wounded airship, the men leapt to it: unpacking rubber life rafts, opening hatches, cutting holes in the silver outer cover of the airship, and rigging lines to lower away.

The ship fell from the darkening sky at 600 feet per minute. It was 5:30pm on February 12, 1935. Soon, it would be night. To make matters worse, a storm had blown in, rain was falling and a significant northwest swell was chopping the frigid sea up into a frenzy below. Yet these were Navy seamen and a plunge into the cold, dark sea was part of the job.

The USS Macon had left its base at Moffett Field the day before to reconnoiter with the Pacific Fleet off the Southern California coast for training maneuvers. Eager to prove the embattled airship program’s versatility and effectiveness, Navy officials had performed a slapdash repair job on two tail fins which had sustained damage on the previous mission.

More modern and slightly faster than the Akron, her doomed sister ship, the Macon had a top speed of about 87 miles per hour and had cost $2.5 million to build in 1933. She had a stronger, improved internal design, which consisted of a hollow steel hull with three interior keels.

This strong internal spine was a direct result of another airship tragedy. In 1925, the USS Shenandoah had failed spectacularly by breaking in half over an Ohio valley and killing 14 crew members. As the Navy’s inaugural rigid airship, the Shenandoah proved to be just the first in a decade-long series of dirigible disasters.

As a result of this tremendously spotted history, the Navy’s rigid airship program had a great many detractors. Most considered the giant dirigibles to be too unwieldy, expensive and unreliable. The USS Macon was supposed to change that perception.

Kept aloft by non-flammable helium contained in 12 large, gelatin-latex cells, the Macon was considered faster and safer than her predecessors. Inside the hull, the ship had eight large 560-horsepower engines, which drove external propellers.Amazingly, the Macon also carried its own protection—six Sparrowhawk fighter biplanes that the dirigible stored in its belly. The airplanes were slowly lowered on a trapeze and harness through a T-shaped hole in the dirigible’s underside. The pilots simply revved up their RPMs, yanked a release lever and dropped into the air in mid-flight.

Retrieving the planes, however, was a wild and white-knuckled ordeal. Each Sparrowhawk had a hook welded to its upper wing. The pilots had to match their speed to that of the dirigible and then gently set the tiny hook back on to the trapeze. The harness would then be attached to the fuselage, and the aircraft would be hoisted back up into the dirigible.

These daredevil pilots, known as “the men on the flying trapeze,” boasted a flawless record on both the Akron and the Macon. Unfortunately, the dirigibles themselves were quite a bit more accident prone.Lt. Cmdr. Wiley and the USS Macon were returning from their successful maneuvers with the Pacific Fleet when they encountered severe storm winds off Point Sur.

A few minutes after 5pm, the great airship lurched sickeningly to port and then rolled slightly back towards starboard. The ship dove slightly, turned to starboard again and then stabilized. A crosswind had struck the ship with such force that the upper fins of the previously damaged tail were completely severed, sending shards of metal into the rear gas cells.

Wiley learned the extent of the damage and ordered all hands to abandon ship as the dirigible drifted slowly down through the cold, hard rain and into the ocean. As she came down, the Macon’s nose was inclined up between five and 10 degrees, plunging the lower fin into the water first.

In the nose, still 100 feet above the surface of the water, Radioman 1st class Ernest Dailey was panicking. He looked down at the dark stormy seas through a hole he’d cut in the shiny outer material of the dirigible, then without warning, leaped into the void. Witnesses say he did a flip in the air and landed on his back in the water below, never to be seen again.

As the airship began to settle into the water, the rest of the crew methodically abandoned her.

They shimmied down lines or leapt into the water and boarded the rubber life rafts which dotted the dark seas around the dying dirigible.

Only one crewman, a Filipino mess steward named Florentino Edquiba, refused to abandon ship.

According to reports, he was last seen trying to scramble up the material of the airship, perhaps looking for another way down. Like Dailey, he was never seen again.

Thankfully, the crew could already see the spotlights of rescue ships slicing through the dark rain. Within an hour the USS Richmond was on the scene, plucking survivors out of the water. In the end, Wiley did, in fact, manage to avoid another Akron disaster.

Of his 83 men, only Dailey and Edquiba lost their lives.Although Wiley and his crew didn’t know it at the time, the US Navy’s entire rigid airship program sank with the Macon into oblivion that night. The crash effectively marked the end of the military’s romance with long-range dirigibles.

More than half a century later, Wiley’s daughter was eating in a Moss Landing restaurant when she recognized a small piece of a rigid airship’s structural girder hanging on the wall. Beside it someone had hung an article about the crash of the USS Macon.

When she asked the owner of the restaurant where he’d gotten it, the man was cagey and less than forthcoming. It was a secret, he said. Yet after some explanation of the artifact’s personal significance, the restaurateur coughed up the name of fisherman who’d recently retired and moved to Richmond.

David Canepa had a magic fishing spot down in Big Sur. It couldn’t miss. And he thought he knew why. In addition to big rock cod, Canepa was also pulling up weird pieces of wreckage.

There was something down there. Some big wreck, which had long ago formed an artificial reef and spawned lots of marine life.

Canepa had discovered the final resting spot of the USS Macon in 1,500 feet of water. But he was loathe to give up the numbers on his prime fishing spot, so he kept the coordinates secret and, instead, gave away the odd pieces of wreckage to his friends as gifts.

Long retired from fishing but still curious about the Macon, Canepa agreed to show scientists from the Monterey Bay Research Institute (MBARI) where the airship rested.

Because of the wreck’s bone-crushing depth, however, a traditional salvage operation was impossible. When the Navy became interested in recovering one of the rare Sparrowhawks, they called on MBARI to help them. So in 1990 and 1991, the Navy and MBARI teamed up to explore and document the crash site, sending first a manned vehicle and then an unmanned remotely operated vehicle (ROV), Ventana, down to photograph the site and to capture some of the wreckage with its robotic arm.

After the initial survey, Navy officials concluded any recovery of the Sparrowhawks would be impossible. Regardless, the expedition dredged up stunning images of the wreckage, including pictures of the intact—if green and ghostly—Sparrowhawks surrounded by huge, brightly colored fish.

The Macon had been rediscovered, but 15 years more years would pass before another significant research effort could be mounted.

In May, a team of researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Marine Sanctuary Program (NMSP), the US Geological Survey (USGS), Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (MLML) and Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) joined forces to further map the debris fields associated with the wreck site. Building upon information gathered by the US Navy and MBARI’s expeditions in 1990 and ‘91, the researchers generated a new map that not only documents the extent of the primary debris fields but also suggests the existence of a debris trail not previously recorded. The ongoing research efforts are currently on display at the Monterey Maritime Museum.

The research marked the fruits of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary’s first maritime heritage cruise within the sanctuary’s boundaries, and represents the first phase of a two-phase research effort to inventory and characterize the USS Macon’s wreck site. Phase II is slated for fall 2006. It will consist of photo documentation using an ROV. Ultimately, the researchers want to create a detailed photo mosaic of the wreck.

Like a whistle through the voice tube of history, the rediscovery of the USS Macon provides a fascinating and mysterious sounding of America’s short-lived love affair with the long-range rigid airship. As the final exclamation point on a romantic era of aviation history, the Macon is both a rich cultural heritage site and a solemn memorial to the men who lost their lives flying these magnificent airships.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE USS MACON AND SCIENTISTS’ EFFORTS TO STUDY ITS REMAINS, VISIT THE MONTEREY MARITIME MUSEUM, 5 CUSTOM HOUSE PLAZA, MONTEREY, 372-2608.


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The Mysterious 1950 Crash of Flight 2501

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WZZM13.com
By Linda Paige
June 20, 2005

Holland - In 1950, commercial aviation was still not a common way to travel.

That year on Friday, June 23rd, Northwest Airlines flight 2501 left New York on its way to Seattle. There were thunderstorms in the area when they reached the West Michigan shoreline. The crew made a radio call, asking to fly lower. That was the last anyone heard from the plane.

Newly married Jackie and Muryl Eldred remember that night. “The storm was really brewing when that plane went over the thunder and lightning it was terrible,” says Muryl.

Jackie says, “it sounded like he was having trouble, motor, it just kept a coming and coming and it seemed like it was getting lower and then all the sudden the motor stopped.”

By dawn the next morning it was clear that the plane had crashed, and an intense search of the lake began.

Larry Otto was a young ensign with the coast guard who helped with the search. He talks about his experience, “we were off Benton Harbor and we didn't find anything." After a couple of days, Larry says, "it came up it bubbled up and what we saw were seat cushions.”

Search teams only recovered small pieces of wreckage. There were no survivors.

At the time, this was the worst airplane disaster in history. Yet amazingly, it did not receive much press coverage. No one from West Michigan was on board, and it happened at the same time President Truman committed the country to fight in the Korean War.

By July 4, 1950, most people in west Michigan had put the crash behind them. But interest in the crash is now increasing.

Solving the mystery of a commercial plane crash in Lake Michigan has become the mission of one prominent shipwreck researcher. Author Clive Cussler and sonar expert Ralph Wilbanks are famous for finding a submarine from the civil war off the coast of South Carolina.

Craig Rich, with the Michigan Shipwreck Research Associates says, "he keeps his eyes open for mysteries around the world that he can help solve.” And he sent Wilbanks to West Michigan to help.

Valerie van Heest, with the Michigan Shipwreck Research Associates says "in the month long time that Ralph Wilbanks was here searching we've covered about 20 square miles of bottom land off south haven.

As of now, so far no airplane."

So the mystery of the lost airliner continues. Clive Cussler will send Ralph Wilbanks back for another month-long search next spring.


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www.airplanes-underwater.blogspot.com

Archaeology and the Fate of Amelia Earhart

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Archaeology.About.com
from Thomas F. King, TIGHAR

The Loss of an Aviation PioneerOn July 2, 1937, aviation pioneers Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan vanished into legend. The two explorers--Earhart piloting, Noonan navigating--were trying to be the first to circumnavigate the globe at the equator, and they’d made it all the way around from Oakland, California eastward to Lae, New Guinea.

On the morning of the 2nd their fuel-heavy Lockheed Electra 10E took off from Lae heading for Howland Island, a tiny speck of coral in the mid-Pacific, where they were to refuel and fly to Honolulu, and thence back to Oakland.

They didn’t make it. The US Coast Guard Cutter Itasca, lying off Howland, received messages from them--the last saying that they were flying “on the line 157-337”--but couldn’t establish two-way communication or a radio direction-finding fix. Earhart and Noonan couldn’t see the island, or communicate with Itasca.

The messages ended, and that was that.The U.S. didn’t give Earhart up easily. She was a tremendous celebrity--a heroine at a time when people badly needed heroines. First woman across the Atlantic, first woman to fly nonstop across the U.S. First to fly to the mainland from Hawaii. Women’s altitude record holder. She was an inspiration to young women everywhere. You, she insisted and demonstrated, can do anything a man can do.

So the nation wasn’t ready to shrug its shoulders and accept that she was gone. Nor was her husband and partner George Putnam, who had been her supporter and agent from the start. Putnam did everything but break down doors at the War Department, the State Department, and the White House, insisting that the Navy, the Coast Guard, the British in the nearby Crown Colony of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands turn the Pacific upside down looking for her.

They tried; the aircraft carrier Lexington, the battleship Colorado, and other Navy and Coast Guard ships and planes criss-crossed the area where she’d last been heard. The British deployed island residents to search the shores of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands for debris, and sent a chartered boat out to investigate a location where Putnam--possibly on the advice of a medium--thought Earhart might be. But everyone came up empty-handed. Earhart’s fate, Noonan’s fate, remain a mystery.

Mysteries demand solutions, and many answers to the Earhart/Noonan mystery have been proposed over the years. They ran out of gas and crashed at sea. They were captured by the Japanese and executed. They were involved in an elaborate espionage operation against the Japanese, and were secreted in other countries, or in the U.S. under assumed names. They were seized by aliens, or blundered through a Bermuda Triangle-type rip in the time-space continuum. Books have been written, television shows produced, archives searched, islanders and World War II GIs and Japanese officials interviewed. Lots of assertions have been made, lots of allegations have been confidently stated but lightly substantiated.

Proponents of the various “theories” typically ignore or dismiss all others but their own, though there are some vituperative arguments behind the scenes. But no one has proved anything. In the late 1980s, a tiny non-profit group in Wilmington, Delaware--The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery or TIGHAR (pronounced “tiger”)--entered the fray. Organized by the dynamic husband-wife team of Ric Gillespie and Pat Thrasher, who continue to oversee its operations today, one of TIGHAR’s purposes is to apply scientific techniques to investigating aviation historical mysteries.

TIGHAR had avoided the Earhart arguments because none of the hypotheses put forward seemed testable using available methods, but then two retired navigators, Tom Gannon and Tom Willi, approached Gillespie with a “new” idea that was testable--using, among others, the methods of archaeology.

As an archaeologist with Pacific island experience and a dearth of common sense, I got involved in TIGHAR’s work, and we’ve been at it ever since. Our adventures in pursuit of Earhart and Noonan are recounted in a book that several of my colleagues and I published a few years ago, and republished in 2004 in updated, expanded form, called Amelia Earhart’s Shoes (AltaMira Press, 2004).

Ric Gillespie is finishing work on a more exhaustive book about the disappearance, the search, and our studies--particularly a study of the many radio messages received after Earhart’s disappearance that were at first thought to have come from her and later were dismissed as mistakes and hoaxes.

We hope that book, tentatively titled The Suitcase in My Closet, will be in bookstores within the next year or so. Our project is an interdisciplinary one--our all-volunteer research team includes oceanographers, meteorologists, experts in navigation, radio science, island geology and ecology, forensic anthropology, and a host of other fields. In this article I’d like to focus on how my own science--archaeology--is contributing to the study.


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Groups team up to find long-lost plane

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Detroit Free Press
May 2, 2005

Nearly 55 years after a passenger airplane with 58 people aboard disappeared over Lake Michigan, a local and an international group are teaming up to search for the wreckage.

For two weeks after the June 23, 1950, disappearance of Northwest Airlines Flight 2501, body parts, clothing, personal effects and debris washed ashore all along Allegan County's coastline.

But the wreckage wasn't found, and the cause of the crash remains a mystery.

The local group, Michigan Shipwreck Research Associates, and an international organization, National Underwater and Marine Agency, which is underwriting the project, have renewed interest in finding the wreckage of the DC4.

"Our goal is to determine what happened to the plane and offer closure to the families," said Valerie van Heest, a member of the Holland-based Michigan Shipwreck Research Associates, which works to preserve submerged maritime history.

Adventure author Clive Cussler is offering to bankroll the project by providing the assistance of Ralph Wilbanks, the same sonar expert who helped him discover the Confederate submarine C.S.S. Hunley off the coast of South Carolina.

South Haven officials closed the popular South Beach for nine days following the crash. John Fleming, who was a Van Buren County health inspector in 1950 and involved in the recovery, recalled the search.

"We never found any whole bodies," said Fleming, who now is 86 and lives in Big Rapids. "And we never found any large pieces of the plane."

By the Associated Press


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Navy divers search for remains of downed WW II fliers

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Navy Times
By Christopher Munsey
April 20, 2005

Seventeen members of Hawaii-based Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit One are using their diving skills to help find remains of American fliers lost in a World War II bombing raid in the Pacific.

The recovery team is searching the wreckage of a B-24J Liberator bomber lost to Japanese anti-aircraft fire during a raid Sept. 1, 1944, in the Palau island chain.

The recovery team was sent out by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, said spokeswoman Army Maj. Rumi Nielson-Green.

The four-engine bomber was shot down with 11 crew members, crashing offshore between the islands of Koror and Babelthuap. Three crew members were captured and later executed by the Japanese, while it’s believed that eight went down with the aircraft, Nielson-Green said.

Wreckage of the aircraft is strewn across an area offshore in water ranging from 34 to 54 feet deep, she said.

“If we didn’t have the MDSU guys involved, it’d be difficult for us to run this operation,” she said.

The work will run until late May, she said.

MDSU-1 previously assisted with a recovery off the coast of Vietnam, she said.


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VideoRay Swimming Robot Records Video of Crash Site of DC-3 Plane Shot Down in 1952

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Video Ray
Press Release
March 19, 2005

Internal and External Assessment Handled by 8-Pound MicroROV Before Wreck is Raised By Swedish Navy.

Exton, PA - A VideoRay ROV (remotely operated vehicle) was the tool of choice when the Swedish Navy equipped the Belos vessel to investigate the crash scene of a Douglas DC-3 airplane that disappeared without a trace in June 1952 over the Baltic Sea. Deployed directly from the Belos, despite sea conditions too rough to deploy other ROVs, the VideoRay successfully video recorded the inside and outside of the wreck at depths over 400 feet.

Replacing divers in tight, fragile, and dangerous conditions, the VideoRay camera eye gathered details and clues that will help the Swedish Navy piece together the final moments of the aircraft downed by Russian gunfire.

Bob Christ of VideoRay and Daniel Karlsson of Wildland Fire International AB of Sweden returned to the wreck in mid-October 2003, following discovery of the DC-3 by a commercial diving company the previous summer. Christ, an ATP rated aircraft pilot, was the operator of the VideoRay and ATP rated aircraft pilot. Daniel Karlsson heads up the fire and rescue division of Wildland Fire and oversaw six dives by the VideoRay aboard the Belos in rough waters east of Gotska Sandon Island, Sweden.

The 8-pound VideoRay II submersible was equipped with an Imagenex 851 scanning sonar used to initially locate the wreck. The tiny, yellow VideoRay submersible was launched by hand through the ship’s moon pool. Lighting and recording the scene, the propeller-operated VideoRay gathered crisp video of the fuselage, cabin, panels, hatches, and wings.

The sub, about the size of a boot box, slipped through an opening of the cargo door above the mud line. A tether attached the sub to a portable control box in the boat and the ROV operator, who watches the video live on a screen. Among other details, the VideoRay captured images of the bullet holes throughout the fuselage and sheared hinges on the exit door

“This mission couldn’t have been completed any other way,” said Karlsson, who has used the VideoRay in different other missions. “Divers can’t sustain at these depths, and the motion of their fins would disturb the fragile scene. The VideoRay is the only ROV that could document places essential to the investigation.” VideoRay microROVs have been used to assess other historic wrecks, including the USS Arizona battleship in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and a B-29 bomber found in Lake Mead, Nevada.

Bob Christ added, “While I’ve worked over 10 different wreck sites throughout the world with ROVs, these are the most extreme conditions I’ve experienced. The VideoRay is the only vehicle that could accomplish the mission.” Since this expedition, Christ’s services have become available for hire on his new company – see http://www.seatrepid.com/ .


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www.airplanes-underwater.blogspot.com

Memory assists in the search for lost plane

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Daily Breeze
By Ian Gregor
February 27, 2005

Frank Jacobs was 12 when he saw an aircraft plunge near LAX. Could it have been WWII pilot Gertrude Tompkins and her P-51D?

Far out on the Manhattan Beach Pier, Frank Jacobs squinted into the bright afternoon light, his hands framing an imaginary spot in the dark blue water off LAX as he willed his mind to replay images that he saw more than 60 years ago.

"What I observed probably was right out there," Jacobs announced after scrutinizing the ocean for a short while, pointing to an area perhaps half a mile offshore. "I can picture it in my mind."

A few feet away from Jacobs, Pat Macha held a compass and got a rough heading on the area.

Macha, an aviation archaeology expert and retired Hawthorne High School history teacher, has hunted since 1996 for a P-51D Mustang fighter plane that he believes crashed and sank off LAX on Oct. 26, 1944, sucking its pilot, Gertrude Tompkins, to a watery grave. Jacobs thinks he witnessed the crash while fishing off the Manhattan Beach Pier for halibut when he was 12 years old.

Macha believes Jacobs' recollections confirm that he is searching in the right place for the plane.

"That's within the area where we're looking," Macha said after taking the compass reading.

Tompkins was a member of an elite group of about 1,100 Women's Air Force Service Pilots (WASPs) who served during World War II, primarily ferrying planes for shipment overseas. The day she disappeared, she was among a trio of WASPs who were to fly brand-new P-51Ds from their manufacturing site to Palm Springs, where they would spend the night before continuing on a three-day journey to Newark, N.J.

Her takeoff was delayed by a canopy that wouldn't close properly; witnesses later reported seeing two P-51Ds buzzing east above Imperial Highway but never a third. She wasn't reported missing until the other pilots got to Newark because they had assumed that she had been unable to take off because of the mechanical problem.

Early next month, divers from a 40-foot San Pedro-based boat called the Ranger are scheduled to make the latest -- and quite possibly last -- in a series of searches for Tompkins' plane. Descending to the ocean bottom just off LAX, they'll examine and photograph two masses of metal that crews found during the last hunt for the wreckage in 2002.
Jacobs, a retired aerospace engineer from Redondo Beach, came forward after reading an account of the search two weeks ago in the Daily Breeze.

He said he had just arrived at the pier on a cloudy day in October 1944 when a loud engine noise prompted him to look north. He watched a fighter plane climb after taking off over the ocean from what is now Los Angeles International Airport's southern runway complex.

Suddenly, there was a sharp drop in the noise level and the plane's engine began sputtering. Then the plane angled over into a shallow, controlled dive that became steeper before it disappeared into the cloud bank that hung low just offshore.

Jacobs said he remembers that one of two adults nearby said something about a P-51 Mustang.

"This event left a very strong, vivid impression on me as a 12-year-old boy," Jacobs said. "I sensed that someone must have died."

Jacobs said he heard no sirens after the crash and was surprised to see nothing about it in the next day's newspaper.
Macha is certain that Jacobs witnessed Tompkins' plane go down, the only P-51 to crash into Santa Monica Bay.
Jacobs' description of the plane's sounds and movements mirror what a half-dozen P-51D pilots have told him could happen if the aircraft went into a low-speed stall, Macha said.

The area where Jacobs believes the plane hit the water is within the area where Macha is searching. Nobody realized Tompkins was missing for four days, which explains the lack of next-day newspaper coverage of the crash. And his memory of the weather matches the actual conditions on the afternoon of Oct. 26, 1944.

"It's certainly something we've been hoping for, to have another source that would indicate or say they saw the plane go in the bay at that time frame," Macha said. "What he described is completely consistent with what every P-51 pilot I talked to said."

Jacobs hopes his memories help.

"I hope that's what I saw," Jacobs said. "It was definitely that year. Definitely that month."


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www.airplanes-underwater.blogspot.com

Dive may solve mystery of airplane that vanished

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Daily Breeze
By Ian Gregor
February 13, 2005

Member of elite Women's Air Force Service Pilots, Gertrude Tompkins, is believed to have crashed into the ocean off LAX 60 years ago.

Late in the afternoon of Oct. 26, 1944, Gertrude Tompkins Silver piloted a sleek new P-51D Mustang fighter plane into thick fog that hung just west of the airfield that is now Los Angeles International Airport.

She was never seen again. Her disappearance has remained a mystery for more than six decades.

That mystery could soon be solved if years of research, planning and hard work are blessed with a little luck.

Early next month, divers from a 40-foot San Pedro-based boat called the Ranger are scheduled to make the latest -- and quite possibly last -- in a series of searches for Tompkins' plane. Descending to the ocean bottom just off LAX, they'll examine and photograph two masses of metal that crews found during the last hunt for the wreckage in 2002.

If the wreckage is indeed a plane, it should be fairly easy to determine if it's a P-51D, said Pat Macha, an aviation archaeology expert and retired Hawthorne High School history teacher who's been investigating Tompkins' fate since 1996. The P-51D's manufacturer, North American Aviation, stamped more parts than most other airplane builders. And only one P-51D crashed into Santa Monica Bay west of the former Mines Field, Macha said.

At the same time, it's far from certain that the debris is an airplane. "It's still a long shot," said Macha, who has written three books on aircraft archaeology and has visited more than 800 crash sites during the past 40 years.

"I'm not overly optimistic but it's in a suspect location and it's metal so we have to check it out."

Macha believes this may be the last chance to find the plane flown by Tompkins, who had been married just one month when she disappeared and was still listed in military records as Tompkins. Further searches to the south -- which is the direction she would have turned after taking off -- are precluded by buoys and underwater obstacles from the Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant, Macha said.

"I think at that point we'd have to take a large step back" if the debris turns out not to be Tompkins' plane, Macha said.
Gertrude Tompkins Silver was a member of an elite group of about 1,100 Women's Air Force Service Pilots (WASPs) who served during World War II, primarily ferrying planes for shipment overseas and pulling along aerial gunnery targets used by the military for target practice.

Tompkins became a WASP in 1943 and, at 32, was one of the older female pilots when she vanished, said her grandniece, Laura Whittall-Scherfee of Sacramento. According to Macha, she was one of 38 to 43 WASPS who were killed in crashes.

The day Tompkins disappeared, she was among a trio of WASPs who were to fly brand new P-51Ds from their manufacturing site to Palm Springs, where they would spend the night before continuing on a three-day journey to Newark, N.J.

Tompkins' takeoff was delayed by a canopy that wouldn't close properly; witnesses later reported seeing two P-51Ds buzzing east above Imperial Highway but never a third, Macha said. She wasn't reported missing until the other pilots got to Newark because they had assumed that she had been unable to take off due to the mechanical problem, he said.

"She had slipped through the cracks," Macha said.

Macha believes Tompkins went down almost immediately after takeoff. His leading theory is that the plane stalled -- possibly because Tompkins wasn't expecting that its center of gravity would be shifted by the full fuel tank directly behind the cockpit -- and went into a low altitude dive from which Tompkins could not recover. Fighters often left no debris on the ocean surface if they sliced almost vertically into the water, he said.

Macha said he had been aware of Tomkins' disappearance but got personally involved in the mystery in 1996, when he was contacted by Whittall-Scherfee.

Whittall-Scherfee said she had heard of her great-aunt as a child, but only delved into her disappearance after she and her husband, who is an aviation and history buff, moved to California. She called Macha after her husband picked up one of his books at an airplane museum.

Pilot's family gets involved
"He said if you're interested, I'm interested in running with it," recalled Whittall-Scherfee, 44. "It's a personal search and one my husband and I are very committed to."

The couple and Macha pieced together facts and a timeline by assembling information from articles, military records and witness statements. Macha organized a series of all-volunteer searches of increasing sophistication, culminating with a 2002 effort that turned up two mounds of debris close together in relatively shallow water less than a mile off Dockweiler State Beach.

The Ranger -- the San Pedro-based boat -- entered the picture because Eric Rosado was watching TV at just the right time.

Rosado was a member of the aerospace club that Macha ran at Hawthorne High School. Now 29 and a commercial diver, he stumbled upon a History Channel documentary called "Broken Wings," which profiled Macha's efforts to find Tompkins' plane.

"I said, 'Hey, I know that guy!' " Rosado said.

Soon after, Rosado volunteered his services to Macha. Five divers he works with also signed up for the endeavor, including Tyler Fenton, the 21-year-old owner and captain of the Ranger.

"All the guys have a love for the ocean," said Rosado, standing in the Ranger's cabin next to a table covered in a large depth chart of Santa Monica Bay. "We want to give back to veterans who gave to us."

Debris covered in sediment
The debris is 25 to 30 feet down, and the last search in 2002 indicated it was covered in six to 12 feet of sediment, which shifts constantly, Fenton said. Visibility in that area is anywhere from zero to 20 feet, depending on weather conditions, he said.

Wearing $5,000 diving helmets and thick black wet suits with Kevlar knee and elbow pads, divers will mark the search area with buoys and rope it off, Rosado said. They'll do a quick swim-by to see if they can spot anything right off. Then they'll stick a camera mounted on a long pipe into the sand, and use an air hose to blow away sediment so they'll be able to photograph what's underneath, he said.

Although a two-day search is planned, Rosado said the divers are willing to work as long as it takes to determine what lurks underneath the ocean floor.

Earlier this week, the crew of the Ranger visited the Western Museum of Flight at Hawthorne Municipal Airport to inspect a P-51D Mustang to get a better idea of what they might be finding under water.

Perhaps luck will be on their side. Last Sunday, while visiting the site near Victorville where a B-25 bomber went down on Oct. 4, 1944, Macha found the insignia of a WASP pilot named Marie Mitchell Robinson, who was killed in the crash along with two other crew members.

He's trying to find her next of kin to return the insignia.


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www.airplanes-underwater.blogspot.com

1940s prop a unique discovery

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Milton Ulladulla Times
by Anne Duffy
February 02, 2005


Arakiwa owner Joe Batagliolo and his son
Santino with the propeller Mr Batagliolo
and his crew dredged up from the ocean
floor off Ulladulla on Australia Day.

The crew of the Ulladulla-based trawler Arakiwa dredged up a piece of history on Australia Day when the propeller from a 1940s naval plane caught in their nets.

The amazing discovery was a huge shock for Arakiwa owner and operator Joe Batagliolo who has been trawling the same area for more than 15 years.

Determined not to leave their unique find out at sea the crew towed the huge tangle of metal back to Ulladulla Harbour where a crane was brought in to lift the more than 60-year-old plane part out of its watery grave.

"It was definitely a surprise to see the propeller in the net," Mr Batagliolo said.

"We were trawling about 14 miles off Ulladulla where the water is about 130 metres deep when we found it at around 11:30am.

"Towing the propeller behind, we didn't get back into harbour until 3pm. "We've trawled there so many times before and never found the propeller.

"Mr Batagliolo and his crew immediately contacted the Australian Navy and a representative was sent from HMAS Albatross to identify the propeller.

The five-blade propeller is at least four metres wide and has rusted significantly. It appears as if the plane, to which the propeller was once attached, hit the ocean with some force as the blades are curled on the ends. "The propellers are warped so it looks like the plane crashed or was ditched.

"We were told it could be one of three planes that have five blades," Mr Batagliolo said.

"It is definitely a Navy plane and could be from the early 1940s."It is one of the most interesting catches we've had.

"We would really like to find out as much about the plane and how it got to be off Ulladulla.

"Despite the excitement the find has also been costly. The tangled net was completely destroyed costing more than $8,000.

"It also wasn't cheap to get a crane on Australia Day to get it out of the water," Mr Batagliolo said.

"But it is still a very rare find. "It would be good it to see the propeller find a home somewhere like the Australian War Museum or with an RSL Club.

"For the moment the propeller is being kept at Costa Engineering until a suitable home can be found.

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Convite ao mergulho em avião e galeão em Faro

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Correio da Manhã
December 21, 2004




Os vestígios de um galeão afundado há 300 anos e de um bombardeiro da II Guerra Mundial são as duas ‘jóias’ subaquáticas que os amantes do mergulho podem descobrir ao largo de Faro, no Algarve, a troco de 50 euros.

Estes ‘mergulhos’ são organizados pela Hidroespaço, uma das poucas entidades privadas que, a nível nacional, explora circuitos arqueólogicos subaquáticos, através de um protocolo formado com o Centro Nacional de Arqueologia Náutica e Subaquática (CNANS).

As visitas, possíveis desde Agosto de 2003, ao que resta do avião e do navio – descoberto por acaso há oito anos por dois mergulhadores em lazer – são as mais procuradas da panóplia de locais para onde aquele centro de mergulho organiza saídas.

Os destroços do avião mantêm-se relativamente intactos. No entanto, o mesmo não se pode dizer do navio, do qual ainda só foi descoberto o que se julga ser a carga – peças de artilharia, canhões e ferro.

Os vestígios encontram-se em frente à Barrinha (extremo Oeste da Praia de Faro), a uma milha da costa – cerca de dois quilómetros –, mas a estrutura do galeão em si ainda está por descobrir.

De acordo com Fátima Noronha, sócia da Hidroespaço, o navio faria parte de uma frota de 400 embarcações inglesas e holandesas atacadas por espanhóis no Cabo de São Vicente.

“Supõe-se que os destroços do navio estejam enterrados na areia mas o Governo diz que não há dinheiro para mais campanhas arqueológicas”, lamentou-se a bióloga marinha.

O avião – um B-24 com 36 metros de envergadura e quatro motores – caiu no mar a 30 de Novembro de 1942, em plena II Guerra Mundial. Seis dos seus onze tripulantes acabariam por ser salvos por três pescadores algarvios, um dos quais ainda está vivo.

Os destroços encontram-se em frente à Praia de Faro, a uma milha e meia da costa. As asas e os motores ainda estão relativamente intactos – falta apenas a carlinga –, e já foram encontradas partes da cauda, hélices, peças de metralhadoras, balas.

“Estamos a tentar fazer um pouco de arqueólogos e a fazer buscas para encontrar mais peças, para depois ligá-las todas e fazer um roteiro. Mas está tudo muito disperso”, declarou Fátima Noronha.

Mas nem toda a gente está apta a ‘mergulhar’ nas profundezas da História, principalmente na zona onde está o navio, a cerca de 30 metros de profundidade, cujo mergulho é orientado por um guia certificado.

Lusa

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5,000 meters deep? Searching for Amelia Earhart's plane

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CDNN
by Stephen Manning
December 18, 2004


Neta Snook with Earhart.

MAINE, USA -- At 5,000 meters beneath the surface, the temperature of ocean water is just above freezing, oxygen is sparse and currents are relatively calm. In other words, ideal conditions for preserving an airplane that might have crashed into the depths nearly 70 years ago, according to marine explorer David Jourdan, who hopes to answer one of aviation's greatest mysteries _ the fate of famed pilot Amelia Earhart.

Jourdan and his Maine-based company, Nauticos, plan to launch an expedition in the spring using sonar to sweep a 1,000-square-mile swath of ocean bottom west of tiny Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean.

It is the latest in a string of missions to learn what happened to Earhart when she, her navigator and their Lockheed Electra plane disappeared on a flight around the world.

"Things tend to last a time" in the deep ocean, said Jourdan. "Our expectation is the plane will be largely, if not completely, intact."

That is, if the plane is even in the ocean.

There is a host of theories about what befell Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan in 1937 as they made one of the final legs of their widely heralded flight.

Some have searched the sea, believing the plane ran out of gas. Others think she survived a crash landing but died on a deserted island. Another theory is that the Japanese captured and executed her. The conspiracy-minded claim Earhart survived and lived out her life under an assumed name as a New Jersey housewife.

This much is agreed on _ Earhart and Noonan vanished July 2, 1937, as they approached an air strip on Howland Island, roughly midway between Australia and Hawaii. They had taken off from Papua New Guinea, just 7,000 miles short of their goal to make Earhart the first woman to fly around the world.

A fearless flyer, Earhart set a string of altitude, distance and endurance records in the 1920s and 1930s, proving the still-young world of flying wasn't reserved for men. She captivated a Depression-era America eager for heroes, was feted by presidents and was compared to Charles Lindbergh. The press dubbed her "Lady Lindy."

The Navy launched a weeks-long search of 250,000 square miles of ocean around Howland and a nearby chain of small islands. No trace was ever found of the plane.

One of those going along on the Nauticos mission is Elgen Long, a former commercial pilot who has spent 30 years researching the mystery.

Long, 77, of Reno, Nev., believes the answer to Earhart and Noonan's fate lies in their radio communications with a U.S. Coast Guard cutter that was tracking their course near Howland Island. Using Coast Guard radio operator's logs, Long concluded Earhart was perilously low on gas because a headwind was much stronger than she had anticipated.

One of her last radio calls said she had only a half hour of fuel left and couldn't see land.

"We can follow her all the way across the Pacific," he said of the radio records. "She ran out of gas just when she said she was going to."

This is Jourdan's second search of the area west of Howland; a 2002 mission was aborted because of technical problems.

The same general area was searched in 1999 by another mission that found nothing conclusive, but Jourdan said his new expedition, costing about $1.5 million, will use better sonar technology and more accurate information on where the plane may have crashed.

The shortage of oxygen and the fairly still water means a metal airplane likely would not have completely corroded, he said.

Any human remains would have long vanished, but Jourdan hopes to find clues such as Earhart's jewelry in the pilot's seat, or perhaps even Earhart's leather jacket.

"That would be eerie," he said.

If he finds it, Nauticos would plan another mission to raise the plane, which would become the centerpiece of a traveling exhibit on Earhart's life, Jourdan said.

Earhart's stepson, George Putnam, was 16 years old when her plane disappeared. Putnam, now 83 and living in Florida, said he supports the mission partly because it could end the wild speculation about what happened to her. He doesn't mind if Nauticos salvages the plane.

"Let's see what happens," he said.

To Long, it could be his last chance to solve one of the 20th-century's biggest mysteries.

"We need the true story of what happened," he said. "The history we read needs to be correct."

SOURCE - LA Times


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Aircraft litter seafloor off S. O'ahu

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Honolulu Advertiser
By Jan TenBruggencate
December 15, 2004

An undersea aircraft museum lies on the ocean floor off South O'ahu, and it includes representatives of virtually the entire era of the flying boats — from early post-World War I biplanes to World War II PBY Catalinas and a postwar behemoth that sank in 1950, the Martin Marshall Mars.


A University of Hawai'i deep-submersible vehicle,
right, approaches the hulk of an old Navy PD-1
flying boat in waters off Pearl Harbor, where a
virtual undersea aircraft museum has been found.
NOAA/HURL photo

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration yesterday announced a series of discoveries made last week and said agencies are mapping the sea-floor to document the area's collection of ships, planes and other maritime archaeological finds.

"Flying boats had a special significance for Hawai'i and the Pacific islands. They were the only way to get between the islands by air before the development of airports," said marine archaeologist Hans Van Tilburg, of the NOAA National Marine Sanctuary program. "The first interisland air transportation in Hawai'i was in flying boats."

The seafloor region off Pearl Harbor may be better known for its ships, like the Japanese miniature submarine that was sunk an hour before the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. The sub's wreckage was found in 2002.

But there's lots more on a bottom of silt and rock in water 1,000 feet deep and extending several miles from the entrance to Pearl Harbor. The deep water has currents but not a lot of turbulence, and many of the aircraft are in remarkable shape, Van Tilburg said.

Some planes have been wrecked. Some have been taken out and dumped, including at least six former PD-1 Navy bi-plane flying boats. The giant Marshall Mars flying boat sank April 5, 1950, after it landed safely with an engine fire and offloaded its crew before the plane exploded.

Between them, they represent the earliest years of flying boats, and what some might term the pinnacle of the genre.
The twin-wing PD-1 designs date to the 1920s. Van Tilburg said a squadron of them flew as patrol craft out of Ford Island in Pearl Harbor. He has found no records of their disposal, but the fact that their fuselages are complete and that wheels are attached suggest they did not fly to their watery ends and were probably dumped, he said.

PBY Catalinas, which served as Navy patrol, rescue and bombing workhorses during World War II, have also been spotted on the bottom off Pearl Harbor.

During the war, the government was looking for ways to get lots of soldiers and gear long distances to places without airports. Size mattered, and new designs dwarfed the little patrol planes.

The Marshall Mars was one of a half-dozen huge flying boats built by the Martin aircraft firm as cargo and personnel carriers after World War II. It was the same era when Howard Hughes was building his famed Spruce Goose. The Mars planes had 200-foot wingspans — roughly the same as that of a 747.

They were named for the Pacific island groups they served: the Marshalls, Carolines, Marianas, Philippines and Hawai'i. Two Hawai'i Mars planes were built. The second is still flying, hauling water to forest fires in the Pacific Northwest.

George Hutton, of Chipley, Fla., who worked on the planes as a radioman in the mid-1940s, said they were comfortable and roomy.

"It was a big, big, monstrous plane, but it was a good plane. You felt very safe in it. There were several decks and you could go up and down circular stairways," Hutton said.

He said he flew one long mission across the Pacific on the Marshall Mars before its fatal flight, in which it landed in the ocean off Honolulu with its No. 3 engine afire. The crew got off in rubber boats, but the fire spread, and the plane exploded, in full view of folks from Waikiki to Pearl Harbor, Van Tilburg said. The plane sank and was lost until a few pieces were located in an undersea survey in August this year. The main wreckage was found in dives on Thursday and Friday.

The history of the region off Pearl Harbor is being prized from the ocean floor by a collaboration of NOAA's National Marine Sanctuary Program, the National Park Service and the University of Hawai'i's Hawai'i Undersea Research Laboratory (HURL), which operates the twin deep-diving submersibles Pisces IV and V.


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"Mars" is found in seafloor survey around Japanese Mini-Submarine

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NOAA News
December 14, 2004


Photo courtesy of the U.S. Navy.
View of Marshall Mars showing the size of
the “flying boat” aircraft. Credit “NOAA/HURL".

A watery grave off the Hawaiian coast is yielding answers about World War II-era aircraft and ships. Explorer-researchers from NOAA and the University of Hawaii joined with colleagues from the National Park Service on an ocean mission off the coast of Oahu, Hawaii, to document sites where historic seaplanes, or flying boats, rest on the ocean floor. The joint-agency team surveyed an area around the site of a Japanese mini-submarine that was discovered by NOAA and the University of Hawaii in 2002.

NOAA marine archaeologists conducted two days of survey dives, December 9 and 10, outside of Pearl Harbor. Hans Van Tilburg and Kelly Gleason of the NOAA National Marine Sanctuary Program and LT. Jeremy Weirich of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration conducted non-invasive documentation of known underwater shipwreck and aircraft crash sites of U.S. Navy flying boats dating from as early as the 1920s. They were joined by Jon Jarvis, regional director of the National Park Service and Doug Lentz, Pearl Harbor National Park Service superintendent.

"To create an inventory of historic items, we're using Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory submersibles to systematically explore the ocean off Pearl Harbor," said Weirich. "That inventory will help us make better management decisions."

One seaplane site documented was the Navy's Marshall Mars, a giant flying boat with a 200-foot wingspan that was forced by an engine fire to land at sea off Oahu in 1950, where the seaplane exploded, burned, broke into pieces and sank with no loss of life. The Mars series of aircraft was built to move cargo, primarily between California and Hawaii, and Marshall Mars once carried more than 308 people aloft, a record at the time.

"We really value the partnership between NOAA, the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory and the National Park Service," said Jarvis, "because it combines our expertise in documenting these important underwater resources."

"This survey means a lot," added Lentz. "We're working with NOAA to survey a wider area around the site of the Japanese mini-submarine to determine if there are other resources in the area we want to protect."

When the mini-submarine was discovered in 2002, the four-inch hole in its conning tower was evidence that crewmembers of the U.S. destroyer Ward were right when they claimed to have fired the nation's first shot of World War II, more than a hour before the air attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In February 2004, the Government of Japan agreed that the mini-submarine was now the property of the U.S. government.

"Submerged historic wreck sites are like time capsules from our maritime past," said NOAA National Marine Sanctuary maritime archaeologist Hans Van Tilburg. "In this case, naval aircraft sites shed light on our technological capabilities both before and during World War II. Seaplanes and flying boats played a critical role in Hawaii and the Pacific."


Larger view of the nose of the Marshall Mars resting
upside down on the seafloor. Credit “NOAA/HURL".

George Hutton was a Navy aviation radioman who flew in four of the five Mars seaplanes, including the Marshall Mars. "She was a fine flying boat," he said, "but take off and landing could be a little hairy, depending on the seas." During one port visit, he walked on the Mars wing. "It was like a football field," he said. Hutton was in the Marshall Mars on the first flight of a Mars aircraft west of Hawaii, opening what would become regular routes to the Philippines, and he was thrilled to be in the first Mars seaplane to make a jet-assisted takeoff. In the 1940s and 50s, stories about the Mars seaplanes referred to crewmembers as "Men from Mars," and when an aircraft set a new record for persons aloft, media reported "Mars is Well-Inhabited."

The seafloor survey mission used HURL’s Pisces IV and V research submersibles and at a depth of about 1,400 feet, researchers recorded images of the crash sites, using digital video and still cameras. The three-man submersibles, capable of diving to 6,000 feet, were piloted by HURL's senior pilot Terry Kerby and Pilot Max Cremer. Chris Kelley of HURL used sonar to assist in mapping the sites and in searching for other heritage resources.

Marshall Mars artifacts were first discovered during HURL dives in August 2004. Earlier naval aviation sites in the area have been located, but their identities have yet to be confirmed.

In August, when Kerby and others discovered the nose and keel of what appeared to be a seaplane, Kerby maneuvered the submersible close to the aircraft's nose where the explorers could clearly read the painted word "Marshall." They didn't know what they had until HURL's Steve Price did some research. "Steve showed me the great photo of sailors standing on the wing of Marshall Mars, and the word "Marshall," on the seaplane's nose was exciting to see, and took my memory back to that first day of discovery."

Kerby's excitement was intact on December 9 after a day of exploring. He had just brought the Pisces submersible back to the research ship, and he had new discoveries to describe. "We maneuvered near aircraft debris that was bent and corroded aluminum with traces of dark blue paint. Then we came upon a huge engine, nose in to the bottom. Further on, we saw propellers sticking up, some straight, some twisted, and as we turned the sub, we saw the propellers were attached to a second huge engine that was still on the wing. And then we discovered a third engine. We knew we'd found the main body of Marshall Mars."

The mission results will aid in documentation of aviation crash sites and shipwrecks that will yield information about loss events and site interaction with the marine environment. They will also help confirm the identity and location of submerged cultural resources located within Hawaii's protected marine areas.

"Preservation legislation supports the survey and inventory of these types of sites," Van Tilburg said. "Navy ships and aircraft are specifically protected as state vessels and often as potential wargraves."

The NOAA National Marine Sanctuary Program seeks to increase public awareness of America's maritime heritage by conducting scientific research, monitoring, exploration and educational programs. Today, the sanctuary program manages 13 national marine sanctuaries and one coral reef ecosystem reserve that encompass more than 150,000 square miles of America's ocean and Great Lakes natural and cultural resources.

NOAA's mission includes exploration of the oceans for the purpose of discovery and the advancement of knowledge. Ocean Exploration benefits NOAA and the nation by supporting a program of exploration across many scientific, cultural and technological disciplines, and among many participants. The NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration promotes discovery-based science, collaboration, education and outreach.

The Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory, or HURL, was established by NOAA and the University of Hawaii. Its mission is to study deep water marine processes in the Pacific Ocean.NOAA is dedicated to enhancing economic security and national safety through the prediction and research of weather and climate-related events and providing environmental stewardship of the nation’s coastal and marine resources.

NOAA is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Relevant Web SitesNOAA Office of Ocean Exploration

NOAA National Marine Sanctuary Program

NOAA Reports Discovery of Japanese World War II Submarine

Media Contact:Fred Gorell, NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration, (301) 713-9444 ext. 181


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Lake Washington "time machine" hooks divers

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The Seattle Times
By Erik Lacitis
Seattle Times staff reporter


Matt McCauley, right, and Jeff Hummel
at McCauley's Mercer Island home in 1984,
after the two hauled up the remains of a
Curtiss SB2C-1A Helldiver bomber.

The latest secret from the bottom of Lake Washington showed itself at midmorning this past Halloween Day, appearing as glowing bronze sonar images on a monitor.

The two divers who had been methodically surveying the lake on their aluminum workboat just north of Kirkland knew they'd hit the jackpot: a World War II torpedo bomber that had gone down in a training exercise over the lake in 1942.

By the next weekend, Crayton Fenn and John Sharps had dived 200 feet to the wreck and videotaped what they then would announce was the heavily damaged — it's in several pieces — remains of a Grumman TBF-1 Avenger. They were rightfully proud.

"It's thrilling. You're the first person in the world who ever made a dive on it," said Sharps, 31, a Microsoft manager.

"It's the thrill of exploration, of solving its mystery."

For most area residents, Lake Washington is known for what it shows on its surface: two floating bridges crawling with cars at rush-hour, partying crowds at the annual hydroplane races, sailboats, water-skiers, beautiful vistas with of Mount Rainier in the background.

Crayton Fenn helped find a torpedo bomber.

But to some two dozen divers, with a hard-core group of maybe a half-dozen, it's what lies at the bottom of the 18-½-mile-long lake that fascinates them: scores of boats, planes and what once was garbage but now would be collectibles.

Most of the divers are associated with three local nonprofit groups that have documented the various treasures at the bottom of Pacific Northwest waters.

With sonar-equipped rigs and high-intensity lights that cut through the pitch darkness at lower depths, they revel in finding artifacts.

"Lake Washington is like a time machine. It's almost like being Indiana Jones. It's an incredible thrill," said Matt McCauley of Kirkland. In 1984, at age 19, he and a buddy gained notoriety by using their ski boat to pull up a discarded Navy bomber at the northeast corner of the lake near Juanita Point.

"You can find old bottles from as back as 1870," McCauley said. "The last person who touched it was living when Native Americans were still on the embankment of the lake. You feel a compulsion to show it to everybody."

From garbage to collectible
At the bottom of Lake Washington, there are seven documented military aircraft, all Navy planes once based at the old Sand Point Naval Air Station. Local experts such as Fenn and Bob Mester, who use specialized sonar equipment to locate sunken historical treasures, said there are 100 to 300 vessels at the bottom, maybe more.

They include a 55-foot passenger steamer, a 137-foot schooner, a surplus 136-foot minesweeper and all kinds of other craft, from drag boats to sailboats.

Mester remembered a spring day in 1991 that he dived down 140 feet off of Sand Point and saw a Lockheed PV2-D Harpoon patrol bomber that had sunk in September 1947, when it went out of control during takeoff.

"There you see this fully armed World War II combat aircraft, its nose stuck in the bottom. The guns are pointing to the surface as if ready to fire right in front of you. You can touch the wheels in the tail and they spin perfectly," Mester said.

"And here it is, all in the middle of a recreation lake with Jet Skis above you and people fishing."

The bottom also holds 18 wooden coal cars, which went down in January 1875, when a stern-wheeler rounding Mercer Island was a hit by a windstorm (back then, coal from Newcastle was shipped to Seattle, with much of it then going to California). The coal cars sit 195 feet down just south of the middle of the Evergreen Point Bridge, many of them upright.

"They are still filled with coal, although the coal flakes in your hand when you pick it up," said Mark Tourtellot, 51.

At age 9, he began diving off Richmond Beach. Now he's co-owner of Fifth Dimension Dive Center in Issaquah and on the board of directors of Submerged Cultural Resources Exploration Team (SCRET), a nonprofit group that documents wreckage found in Pacific Northwest waters.

In his store, Tourtellot showed off items he has collected from the bottom of the lake, such as a J.G. Fox & Co. glass root-beer bottle from the early 1900s, found in 40 feet of water off of Leschi.

Then, he said, when ferries took passengers from Mercer Island to Seattle, it was common for Eastside residents to take their garbage and use wooden boxes or burlap bags and dump it into the lake. The old garbage now is a collectible.

The state Department of Natural Resources says it's OK for divers to take photos of such artifacts but not to touch or move them. But it acknowledges it's not equipped to enforce a state law saying treasures abandoned 30 years or more become untouchable state property.

The state did go after a Kirkland man who was eventually convicted of stealing a history of sorts in the early 1990s from the bottom of Lake Washington: trees that had sunk either when being transported from logging mills or that had been part of an ancient forest that ended up in the lake after landslides 1,000 to 3,000 years ago. The salvager had hired divers to cut the trees and bring them to a barge.

The Navy doesn't want its old planes brought up, either because they are gravesites containing human remains or because of fears about pillaging.

In 1985, the Navy did lose one court battle with McCauley and Jeff Hummel, then 20, who had brought up a Curtiss SB2C-1A Helldiver bomber a year earlier from 150 feet near Juanita Point.

The two had heard stories that the Navy would take useable parts of planes that had been in accidents, torch the planes for training in fire drills and then dump them in the lake. They decided to go looking for the wreckage.

"We and our friends took a 17-foot ski boat, a fish finder and sidescan sonar, and the plane showed up," McCauley remembered. The group pulled a 15-foot wing section and 10 feet of fuselage onto a boat ramp, and then towed it to McCauley's driveway. McCauley and Hummel thought they might break even on their efforts by selling the plane to a museum or collector.

Mostly, though, it was about the excitement of the search, and the find. "You feel like you've found a galleon full of treasure," McCauley said. "You're swimming on this eerie, muddy bottom, and all of a sudden you see a wall of burnt aluminum sticks": parts of an old fighter plane.

The judge ruled in favor of the two divers, telling the Navy to "back off a little" in its quest to protect planes it had junked. That plane and four other discarded hulks that McCauley, Hummel and fellow divers later brought up ended up with Minnesota and Pennsylvania collectors.

McCauley, 40, no longer dives as frequently; now that he's a husband and father, his wife isn't keen on 200-foot underwater explorations.

But a diver such as Mester, however, who has explored the lake more than 100 times in the past decade, isn't about to give it up. His three adult children also are divers. It never gets boring for him.

"The visibility is limited, maybe five, six, 10 feet," he said. "Another 10 feet, and it's all new."


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www.airplanes-underwater.blogspot.com

New Protection For Sunken Military Vessels And Aircraft Enacted

__________________________________________________________________________________

Navy News Stand
From Naval Historical Center Public Affairs
Story Number: NNS041124-07
Release Date: 11/24/2004 10:35:00 AM


Official U.S. Navy file photo of a 3”/50-caliber
gun mounted on the starboard bow side of the
USS Susan B. Anthony’ (AP-72). The Susan B.
Anthony, a troop transport, struck a sea-mine
and sank on June 7, 1944. The booms and
damage to the number one hold (at the bow)
are easy to see in this image. Title XIV of the
recently passed 2005 National Defense
Authorization Act (Public Law Number 108-375),
preserves the sovereign status of sunken U.S.
military vessels and aircraft by codifying both
their protected sovereign status and permanent
U.S. ownership regardless of the passage of time.

WASHINGTON (NNS) -- On October 28, 2004, President George W. Bush signed the fiscal year 2005 National Defense Authorization Act. Title XIV of the Act (Public Law Number 108-375), preserves the sovereign status of sunken U.S. military vessels and aircraft by codifying both their protected sovereign status and permanent U.S. ownership regardless of the passage of time Oct. 28.

The purpose of Title XIV, generally referred to as the Sunken Military Craft act (SMCa), is to protect sunken military vessels and aircraft and the remains of their crews from unauthorized disturbance.

"Thousands of U.S. government warships and military aircraft lie in waters around the world," said Dr. Robert Neyland, Underwater Archaeology Branch, Naval Historical Center. "Recent advances in technology have made these wrecks accessible to looters, treasure-hunters, and others who may cause damage. With this legal protection, the potential for irreversible harm to important historical resources is significantly reduced.”

Moreover, many military wrecks are the final resting places of Americans who died defending our country. Unauthorized disturbance threatens the sanctity of these war graves.

“This issue is a growing concern both nationally and internationally because in addition to war graves, many sunken warships and aircraft contain objects of a sensitive archaeological or historical nature”, said Neyland.

The new law codifies commonly understood principles of international law and existing case law confirming that sunken U.S. military vessels and aircraft are sovereign property. This new statute provides for archaeological research permits and civil enforcement measures, including substantial fines, to prevent unauthorized disturbance.

The Department of the Navy will issue implementing regulations authorized under this law consistent with present permitting procedures.

This law does not affect salvage of commercial merchant shipwrecks. It does not impact the traditional uses of the sea, including commercial fishing, recreational diving, laying of submarine cables and pipelines, and the routine operation of ships.

Information regarding Department of the Navy policy and procedures with regard to sunken Navy ship and aircraft wrecks is available online at http://www.history.navy.mil/ under the Underwater Archaeology Branch section.

The current application guidelines for archaeological research permits on ship and aircraft wrecks under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Navy are located in 32 Code of Regulations Chapter VI, Part 767.

For related news, visit the Naval Historical Center Navy NewsStand page at www.news.navy.mil/local/navhist.


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Divers find WWII Navy warplane 62 years after crash into Lake Washington

___________________________________________________________________________________
CDNN
November 15, 2004

SEATTLE, Washington -- An underwater search and recovery team said they have found the wreckage of a World War II-era Navy war plane in Lake Washington.

Two members of the Innerspace Exploration Team, a nonprofit group based in suburban Mill Creek, found the TBF-1 Avenger torpedo-bomber last month using high-resolution sonar technology, the group announced today.

Crayton Fenn, one of the divers who spotted the aircraft Oct. 31, said it was broken up in several pieces about 200 feet beneath the surface off the lake's northwestern shore near Magnuson Park, the site of the Sand Point Naval Air Station during World War II.

The search took only an hour and 15 minutes, because the other diver involved, John Sharps, had done research on the plane crash that helped pinpoint its location.

"Sure enough, it was right where he thought it would be," said Fenn, who runs and owns Fenn Enterprises, a marine survey company.

The plane crashed on Aug. 17, 1942, when it had a mid-air collision with a Grumman F4F Wildcat during a training exercise. Both planes were based at Sand Point.

The Avenger, the same type of plane former President George H. W. Bush was flying when he was shot down in 1944, was badly damaged and crashed into the lake. The pilot and one gunner were rescued, but a second gunner died.
The pilot of the Wildcat bailed out and was rescued.

Established in 1984, the Innerspace Exploration Team said it was the first to discover six of the nine aircraft known to be submerged in Lake Washington.

The group has been involved in several other projects, including searching for derelict fishing gear in northern Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and helping NASA and other federal agencies search for Columbia Space Shuttle debris in 2003.

SOURCE - Reuters

Check out this link with Avenger specs.


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www.airplanes-underwater.blogspot.com

F-106 Delta Dart fighter plane found in North Dakota lake

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CDNN
October 01, 2004



BISMARCK, N.D. -- Members of a North Dakota surveyors' group say they used their math skills to find parts of an Air Force fighter plane that crashed in Lake Sakakawea more than 35 years ago.

The members of the state's Professional Society of Land Surveyors found the wreckage of the F-106 Delta Dart interceptor fighter last Saturday, ending a 13-year search.

The plane crashed in the lake on March 10, 1969. Its pilot, Capt. Merlin Riley, who was on a training mission from the Minot Air Force Base, parachuted safely to the ground.

The plane cost $3.3 million when it was built in 1959, the military said. It plunged through the ice and sank to the bottom of the lake. Military officials said the ice was too unstable to attempt recovery at the time.

Larry Smith of Bismarck, a surveyor society's former president, suggested in 1991 that the group try to find the plane based on the Air Force's original survey notes.

"It was a mystery and a challenge," Smith said. "Putting a challenge in front of a bunch of surveyors is like waving a red flag in front of a bull."

Smith said the original notes were not easy to follow, and the mystery of the missing plane was solved through research and good calculations.

"When I talk about this, I can say, 'Here's what math does. Geometry and trigonometry is how we solved this thing,'" Smith said.

For now, the surveyors are not revealing the exact location of the wrecked plane. They plan to return next summer and map it.

"Then, anybody who wants to dive on it, can," Smith said.

The surveyors had detected something earlier with a depth finder on the lake bottom. Last Saturday, a group of divers went in, on an autumn day when boat traffic was virtually nonexistent. They anchored a dive boat over a spot 4 miles northwest of the 4 Bears Bridge at New Town.

A diver went down 35 feet and found nothing. He went back down with a metal detector, and it started to make noise. The diver groped in the silt and muck, grabbed a solid object and surfaced.

From the boat, what he was holding up looked like a muddy stick. Once the silt and clay were rubbed off, the long object turned out to be a fuel line with an attached valve. It still smelled like jet fuel.Divers eventually brought some 30 pieces of the plane to the surface.

Smith along with surveyors Ken Link of Hazen and Greg Johnson of Bismarck, had gone to the area several times to try to retrace the original survey lines.

The original surveyor said he planted a wooden stake on a very sharp ridge and wrote, "I left a tomato juice can here also," Link said.

Another point of reference was a "white rock on a windy hill," Link said.

Some of the observation points had washed into the lake.Last year, Johnson reviewed the survey notes again and realized the surveyor was referring to a bridge pier out in the water.

With new calculations, the three men went out last summer and set buoys. A depth finder revealed a sonar image of very likely "hump" on the lake bottom 80 feet from one of the buoys.

Smith, who is a member of the Morton County Sheriff's Department's Dive and Rescue Team, got permission to use the county's dive boat and equipment and solicited volunteers to make the dive. Last Saturday was possibly the last best chance for the season, so they grabbed it.

They looked for a point on the water based on last summer's survey calculations and depth soundings, and it turned out "we were right over the debris point," Smith said.

The debris probably is spread out in a 100-foot radius from the center, Smith said. The plane measured 70 feet long, with a 38-foot wingspan.

When it crashed in 1969, it was in 68 feet of water. The lake is lower now, and it was easier to dive 35 feet to the wreck, Smith said.

When the first diver came up with a piece of fuel line, one of his diving buddies told him, I've never seen you beam like that,'" Smith said. "It was fantastic."

SOURCE - Bismarck Tribune


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Papua New Guinea divers find P-38 WWII warplane in 'immaculate' condition

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CDNN
By Lamar Bennington
September 21, 2004


P-38 Lockheed Lightning. WWII warplanein Milne Bay.

PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea -- Native Papua New Guinea divers have found a sunken P-38 Lockheed Lightning WWII warplane in immaculate condition in Milne Bay, a renowned dive traveler destination.

Henry Katura and his father Remigus discovered the wreck of the P-38 airplane while diving for beche-de-mer.

Remigus said he remembered that as a child during World War II, he and other villagers heard the crash of an airplane that ditched into the ocean, but they never found the pilot.

Although the details of the crash are unknown, the near-perfect condition of the wreck indicates the pilot may have survived the crash.

According to a liveaboard operator in New Guinea who has already been diving on the wreck, the cockpit cover is missing, which supports the theory that the pilot escaped alive.

Divers in New Guinea have also recovered the P-38's radio call sign - '2-12649' - which led to military archives that show the plane took off from San Francisco on August 12, 1942 bound for the 5th Air Force USAAF in Australia.

Why it crashed in New Guinea four months later is part of the mystery that makes war wrecks so interesting for divers.

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Rift leaves hundreds of planes in world's bodies of water

_________________________________________________________________

The Virginian-Pilot
By Jack Dorsey
August 23, 2004


An SBD Dauntless rests 150 feet below the surface of Lake Michigan.
This front view shows the cockpit with its bomb sight and twin
.50-caliber machine guns.
PHOTOS FROM THE A&T RECOVERY AND CREW

Today, they have Oceana, Fentress and the decks of a dozen aircraft carriers.But 60 years ago, in the heat of World War II, young Navy pilots learning the art of carrier takeoffs and landings had it a little rougher.

With German submarines patrolling the East Coast and the Japanese threatening the West Coast, the Navy took its carrier-landing training inland to Lake Michigan. Flying off the shore of Chicago, nearly 18,000 pilots – including former President George H.W. Bush – honed their skills on “lake carriers.”

They practiced on two converted side-wheel paddle steamers – coal-fueled former excursion ships with their tops cut off. Much smaller than the Navy’s biggest carriers, the makeshift flat-tops were a considerable challenge for fledgling aviators.

Eight pilots died in the training; hundreds of others survived accidents that left an estimated 200 planes at the bottom of Lake Michigan. That graveyard of planes is a treasure trove of Naval aviation history: Grumman F-4F Wildcat fighters, Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers, F-4U1 Corsairs and F-6F3 Hellcats.

The aluminum carcasses at the bottom of Lake Michigan – and other wrecks across the world – are also at the heart of a clash between two Navy agencies with different ideas on how best to preserve the wrecks.

Officials with the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, Fla., want to retrieve the planes and put them on display.

But archaeologists with the Naval Historical Center in Washington, which claims ownership of all Navy aircraft and ship wrecks, believe the treasures may be better left alone.

Proponents of retrieval say waiting could result in the eventual corrosion of the wrecks, especially those in salt water graves.

“The Navy Historical Center and its underwater archaeology people are the obstacle to the salvage of Navy aircraft, not only from Lake Michigan, but everywhere else in the world,” said Ed Ellis, the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation’s secretary and a retired Navy captain and lawyer. But Robert S. Neyland, head of the underwater archaeology branch of the Navy Historical Center, defends leaving the wrecks undisturbed.

“Those that are left are very good resources for the future,” he said. “That resource should be used in good stewardship. Think how much more important it will be to recover one in 100 years from now, or 150 years from now, once this generation has died.”

For now, the two sides are at a stalemate – no U.S. Navy planes have been raised since 1996.

The Navy used more than 100 carriers in World War II; today’s Navy has just 12 of the floating airfields.

During the war, the “real” carriers were needed for combat, mostly in the Pacific. So for training purposes, the Navy cobbled together the two lake carriers.

The excursion ships, renamed Wolverine and Sable, were fitted with 550-foot flight decks just 27 feet above the water. The real carriers had decks that were almost 900 feet long and 80 feet off the water.

Normally, planes have to take off from carriers headed into a stiff wind, often generated by a fast-moving carrier. But the lake carriers barely were able to make 20 knots, and when they couldn’t do that, training stopped until the wind increased.

The ships left almost daily from Navy Pier in downtown Chicago. The main complaint from the locals was that when they left the pier, soot from their smoke stacks soiled laundry drying on lines. So the ships were ordered to leave port before dawn, before the clothes were hung.

Operating from nearby Glenview Naval Air Station, the pilot trainees would visit the carriers only briefly. They needed just eight successful takeoffs and landings and often qualified in two or three days; today’s pilots need a minimum of 48 “touch-and-goes” to be qualified.

The Lake Michigan wrecks are just a fraction of what is out there: the Navy has identified about 12,000 World War II crash sites on land or in the water. Museums have retrieved some for restoration and display, including 31 from Lake Michigan before the Navy Historical Center put the clamps on raising planes.

Many of the planes raised from Lake Michigan were in near-pristine condition because of the cold, fresh water. Some had fuel in their tanks, propellers that spin, inflated tires and 12-volt batteries still able to accept a charge.

A few were even restored to air-worthy status. A Grumman F-4F3 Wildcat discovered in Lake Michigan in 1992 is the only one still flying out of 2,000 produced.

Another group also favors raising the wrecks: salvage companies that can recover the planes.

“The turf battle between the agencies is relatively new,” said Peter E. Hess, an admiralty lawyer from Wilmington, Del., and an avid wreck diver for 20 years. “But the battle between the private-sector salvor wishing to recover the wrecks and the bureaucrats wishing to stand guard over them has been going on since the advent of scuba diving.”

Taras C. Lyssenko of A&T Recovery in Chicago has retrieved three dozen aircraft from Lake Michigan, including the prized F-4F3 Wildcat that is back in the air. He has no love for the Navy Historical Center.

“NHC has been the most harmful agency to the preservation of naval history,” Lyssenko said. “They have stopped the recovery of airplanes which are being ripped apart by zebra mussels and salt water in the ocean.”

Some of Lyssenko’s discoveries are on display at museums in Long Island, N.Y.; aboard the carrier Yorktown, in Charleston, S.C.; aboard the carrier Lexington in Corpus Christie, Texas; in San Diego, Palm Springs, Calif., and Seattle; at O’Hare and Midway airports in Chicago; and at the Navy museum in Pensacola, Fla.

Robert Rasmussen, director of the Pensacola museum for the past 17 years, declines to criticize the NHC and says that the 30 aircraft the museum has recovered from Lake Michigan “have given us tremendous resources.”

Four of the museum’s planes were in combat before being returned to the United States and used for training on Lake Michigan. One was a veteran of the Battle of Midway.

“We are working on a project now to recover two from the lake,” Rasmussen said. “One is a F-4U1 Corsair and the other is a F-6F3 Hellcat. The Corsair is very rare. It was used by the Marine Corps during the greater part of the war in the Pacific.”

Rasmussen did say that “there is urgency to get them up.”

In some cases, the Lake Michigan planes are the only examples left in the world of some models . “Before we got the combat veterans out of Lake Michigan, we had zero combat veterans of World War II,” Rasmussen said.

Lyssenko, a former Army Ranger who has operated his salvage business out of Lake Michigan since the early 1980s, says he has mapped the location of at least 80 aircraft wrecks, but won’t reveal the locations to the Navy without a fee.

In June, Navy Historical Center archaeologists attempted to locate the lake wrecks. A team of seven Navy divers from Fort Story in Virginia Beach – Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit 10 – towed two of their boats to Lake Michigan to search for the wrecks. But the poor weather inhibited the search , and the divers were only able to verify two sites.

Hess, the admiralty lawyer, successfully has battled state and federal governments to open shipwrecks, such as the Monitor, to the diving public. He maintains that the public has a right to the underwater aviation wrecks.

“You don’t protect the site by leaving it underwater,” he said. “You protect it by recovering it and restoring it.”

He noted that Neyland headed the recovery efforts of the confederate submarine H.L. Hunley, which sank in 1864 off South Carolina’s coast and was raised in 2000.

“Why raise a submarine and not an airplane?” he said.

Neyland, who joined NHC in 1994 , says he is concerned that some planes are further damaged in the process of being raised, and that often there is no clear plan to preserve their originality.

“If somebody has a good use for the aircraft and can learn something from them, and if they have a good plan for the display, I don’t think we have any real objection,” Neyland said. “I don’t know where Pensacola plans to display the two aircraft from Lake Michigan.”

Neyland also said that some planes have been raised, then used by museums as currency, a transaction authorized by the Secretary of the Navy.

“In the past we did have some concern here about aircraft being traded out of the Navy to pay for other services by the museum and the foundation,” he said. “We questioned whether that was being a good use of the aircraft as a resource.”

Through the Pensacola museum, Lyssenko said he had permits to retrieve two planes, but that those permits expired in 2001 and have not been renewed by the Navy Historical Center.

Lyssenko said the center placed so many additional demands on the projects, including increasingly detailed archaeological reports, that it increased the recovery cost by $80,000 per plane. That increase is passed on to the foundation, or museum, and eventually the Navy, which funds both organizations .

Generally, the cost of salvage, depending on water depth, has been between $150,000 and $170,000 a plane, according to Ellis, secretary of the Pensacola museum.

Ellis said that the Navy Historical Center also has added red tape to the salvage process.

“They have taken the position that every aircraft crash site must have an archaeological survey and a fully documented record of the salvage,” he said.

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