Treasure Hunting for Airplanes: The Great Debate

Aviation archaeologists want to bring academic rigor to wreck chasing. Not everyone agrees.

Aviation wreck chasers know all about being tired, frustrated, and supremely discouraged. It comes with the territory when you’re looking for artifacts that, by definition, languish far from the beaten path, largely forgotten or never found in the first place. Not surprisingly, most crash-site hunters have been in Tony Romeo’s position. Not in his precise location, mind you (on a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean). But in his dejected headspace.

With his brother Lloyd and a crew of 14, Romeo had spent the previous three months searching for a maritime version of a needle in a haystack: the Lockheed Electra 10-E flown by Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan in their quest to circumnavigate the globe in 1937. Now, time was up, and the only human-made objects they’d spotted were a length of cable, a 55-gallon drum, and a lone beer can. 

It was the fall of 2023, and Romeo’s Deep Sea Vision team was the latest in a long line of Earhart detectives to come up empty-handed. The location of the missing twin-engine Electra and the fate of its occupants is the greatest unsolved mystery in aviation history, and a number of elaborate and wildly implausible theories have been advanced to explain it.

The Romeo brothers had hoped to solve the mystery by getting back to basics. Starting with Earhart’s last known position, heading, and likely airspeed, they drew up a wide swath of ocean grids near her destination—Howland Island, a tiny, uninhabited speck in the Pacific, roughly halfway between Australia and Hawaii, where Earhart planned to refuel. To systematically search the grids, they brought an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV)—a Kongsberg Discovery HUGIN—and outfitted it with a sophisticated form of synthetic aperture sonar, which sends out acoustical pulses to detect objects on the ocean floor.

Time and time again, the submersible would leave the mothership and descend 17,000 feet. After a 36-hour stint, it would return to the ship, where the sonar data was downloaded and laboriously analyzed. The underwater vehicle’s batteries were then recharged so that it could begin searching the next grid. Nearly 100 days and 5,200 square miles of ocean yielded no discoveries. It was time to cut bait. The Romeos had financed the purchase of the HUGIN submersible with the expectation they would lease it out for other underwater projects. Deep Sea Vision reluctantly ended the Earhart adventure and set sail to a previously scheduled paying job.

When they were hundreds of miles away from the submersible’s last grid dive near Howland Island, Deep Sea Vision’s sonar expert, Craig Wallace, poked his head into the galley and said: “Hey, you guys got to take a look at this.” Romeo hustled up to the bridge. Wallace hit “play” on a computer, and a series of sonar images started scrolling down the screen, like movie credits. There was what appeared to be a pair of wings. There was a fuselage. There was a twin tail. All largely intact, as if an airplane had ditched after running out of fuel and settled gently 15,000 feet beneath the surface.

“It was this surreal moment,” says Romeo. “And I remember thinking, this is the first time we’ve seen her plane in 80 years.”

The Deep Sea Vision crew hasn’t yet returned to the site to confirm that what they found is an airplane, much less Earhart’s long-lost Lockheed. But Dorothy S. Cochrane, curator of general aviation in the aeronautics department at the National Air and Space Museum, gives the team credit for an effort “based on facts from Earhart and Noonan, their flight, the aircraft, the intermittent communications, and more.” Cochrane, who has known the Earhart family for years, says the stage was set for Earhart’s refueling stop on Howland Island with a government-built landing strip and the U.S. Coast Guard ship Itasca waiting off the coast. One of Earhart’s last radio messages to the Itasca was: “We must be on you but cannot see you, but gas is running low.” 

While Deep Sea Vision was searching in the right area, there’s still plenty of skepticism about the group’s find in the small but rabid Earhart community. “I don’t think much about their claim,” says Ernie LeRoy, a lifelong aerospace professional and board member of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR). “My first thought when I saw that image was: What’s the scale? Is it the size of an airplane or two football fields wide?” 

Since its founding in 1985, TIGHAR has mounted several Pacific expeditions in search of America’s most famous aviatrix. Later this year, in fact, the group will publish a book full of evidence suggesting that Earhart and Noonan made landfall at another uninhabited dot in the ocean, Gardner Island (now known as Nikumaroro) where they presumably died of dehydration and starvation. Meanwhile, more outlandish narratives purport that Earhart was a spy who was shot by the Japanese or that she returned surreptitiously to the United States, where she lived under an assumed identity.

Maybe Romeo will confirm that he’s found Earhart’s Electra. Maybe he won’t. Either way, his experience—both the highs and lows—help explain why wreck chasing is such an addictive pastime. The thrill of the hunt and the possibility of finding a wreck that’s never been seen before—or rediscovering and documenting one that’s been lost to history—are the catalysts behind what’s known broadly as aviation archaeology, a field that’s captivated growing numbers of amateurs and professionals, hobbyists and academicians. Philosophical debates about the rules governing the discipline have likewise grown in intensity. 

Aviation archaeology is a big tent held up by a wide variety of poles. On the amateur side, the hobby is dominated by self-described wreck chasers who obsessively visit sites to catalogue accidents and reverse engineer what caused the crashes. Some of these hobbyists pocket souvenirs, while others believe that nothing should be disturbed. When possible, they contact survivors of the accidents and families left behind by fatal crashes.

In contrast with the amateurs are professionals known popularly—and sometimes derisively—as treasure hunters or, in legal terminology, salvors. They identify sites where they can search for parts that can be used in the restoration of rare and valuable airplanes, typically military airplanes flown during World War II. Many of these airplanes ended up underwater, where it’s sometimes possible to salvage entire airframes that could end up displayed in museums or even flying at airshows.

Federal and state agencies are also major players. Crash sites on public property are subject to regulations that govern historic preservation and the environment. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Department oversees projects that involve service members who were lost or killed in action. Also, since the U.S. Navy asserts ownership of all its assets, it plays a mission-critical role in would-be salvage operations that search for parts, airplanes, or human remains.

The fastest-growing group in aviation archaeology is the newest. During the past 25 years, there’s been an influx of academically trained archaeologists who’ve brought to the field a rigorous set of standards for crash-site preservation. Although these standards align with the best practices in older, much more mature areas of archaeology, they often conflict with the way aviation business—with an emphasis on business—has been conducted for decades. 

So, yes, aviation archaeology is a big tent, but it’s not filled with happy campers singing kumbaya. “A lot of people are still at odds over how the resources should be used,” says archaeologist Megan Lickliter-Mundon. Her doctoral dissertation covered three projects she investigated personally: a World War II Consolidated B-24J that went down in present-day Croatia, a Martin PBM-5 Mariner flying boat that sank near Seattle after the war, and the USS Macon, a Navy airship lost off the coast of California’s Big Sur before the war along with four Curtiss F9C-2 Sparrowhawk biplane fighters stored on board in an internal hangar.

Aviation archaeology is starting to raise some big questions. Should all wrecked airplanes be displayed in museums? Should they belong to the wealthy collectors who finance their recovery and restoration? Should they even be recovered at all, much less restored with modern components? Would the public be better served if wrecked aircraft were preserved where they lie, as solemn memorials to the air crews who flew them? Should wrecked airplanes be classified as monuments or are they simply part of the environment, like abandoned mineshafts?

Although Lickliter-Mundon says there are no easy answers, she maintains that these questions must be asked. “Right now, these are objects of the very recent past,” she says. “But one day, there will be no more flying vintage aircraft. So I think that a lot of the university-archaeology mindset is to anticipate the future and get guidelines in place for how to treat these objects in 100 years, 200 years, 300 years.”

Detective work

Aviation archaeology developed organically, you might even say naively, in Great Britain immediately after World War II. Six years of combat had salted British soil with an unnatural but valuable resource in the form of thousands of crashed airplanes. Countless tons of steel and aluminum were recovered during postwar scrap metal drives. During the 1960s and ’70s, scavengers looted many of the crash sites. A series of ugly incidents involving human remains and exploding bombs prompted the passage of the Protection of Military Remains Act in 1986, and legal restrictions on wrecked aircraft remain extremely unyielding in the United Kingdom.

For economic, cultural, and geographic reasons, aviation archaeology in the U.S. has followed a different path. Even though no combat missions were flown here, scads of airplanes were lost in training accidents, weather-related crashes, and other mishaps. Military authorities investigated these incidents shortly after they occurred. Typically, human remains were recovered, and when logistical challenges prevented the wreckage from being hauled away, airplanes were demilitarized by removing weapons and ordnance. But that still left thousands of military aircraft—or what was left of them—far from the beaten path, deteriorating on mountains and in deserts and submerged in lakes and oceans. 

For surviving military aircraft, government agencies started selling off the surplus. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a market for these militarily obsolete airplanes began to emerge.

The first red-letter date was 1964, when air racing—which had ended with a fatal crash in Cleveland in 1949—was resurrected in Reno, Nevada (see “Last Race at Reno,” Winter 2024). Only eight military airplanes showed up for the inaugural event. Twenty years later, there were 31 fighters and 18 North American T-6 Texan advanced trainers. Popular culture also raised the profile of World War II-era airplanes. The TV version of 12 O’Clock High, featuring a B-17 bomber squadron, first aired in 1964, and Battle of Britain and Tora! Tora! Tora! hit the big screen in 1969 and 1970, respectively.

In 1963, Pat Macha was a summer camp counselor leading weekly hikes on San Gorgonio, the highest peak in southern California. Bored with the standard route, he took a detour that unexpectedly led him to a wrecked Douglas C-47 Skytrain, the military version of the DC-3. When Macha asked the local park ranger about the site, he was told: “Well, if you’re interested in seeing crash sites, here are some other ones from World War II.”

This was catnip to Macha, an airplane buff who would later teach high school history, and he embarked on what turned out to be a lifelong quest to document every aircraft wreck in California. “The Civil Air Patrol had a plethora of sites in their database,” he says. “Then I went through newspapers, starting in October and running through early May, figuring that most of the wrecks occurred in bad weather. If I found a certain location, say, in the Santa Ana Mountains near Santiago Peak, I’d go talk to the ranger. Back in those days, they were lifers on their sites, and they knew their backyard. Other leads took me to people and pilots who’d tell me, ‘Oh, I know about this wreck’ or ‘My buddy was killed over there.’ ” Eventually, Macha wrote a book about historic wrecks in southern California. Then another. Then a third. He’s now up to six books. 

Macha is the wreck chasing equivalent of a vinyl LP completist. While he casts as wide a net as possible, others focus with laser-like intensity on either warbirds, jets, or airliners. The most prominent of these specialists are Pete Merlin and Tony Moore, whose interest in experimental airplanes flown by the military and NASA (and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics before that) inspired former Air & Space/Smithsonian associate editor Perry Turner to dub them “the X-Hunters.” Merlin and Moore have documented more than a dozen X-plane crash sites. “We were like Sherlock Holmes and Indiana Jones rolled into one,” says Merlin.

Talk about wreck chasing probably calls to mind mental images of swashbuckling searchers hacking through jungles and bounding through ravines before magically coming upon largely intact airplane carcasses. Think again. These airplanes weren’t landing; they were crashing. Most propeller-driven models smashed into the ground at more than 100 miles per hour, and speeds tended to be much, much higher for jets. Also, when possible, the military hauled off the big pieces. The leftovers, in the vast majority of cases, are what wreck chasers call “microsites” filled with “giblets”—tiny shreds of metal and maybe some personal effects strewn over a large debris field. If you want to find more than that, you have to go where few have gone before.

“In Colorado, there is an F-100 with the cannon still laying right there next to the wreckage,” says Colorado Aviation Historical Society secretary Brian Richardson, a pilot and airframe and powerplant mechanic who retired as a safety program manager at the Federal Aviation Administration. “It would make a great mounting for a man cave. But at 13,000 feet, you couldn’t pick it up. Below 10,000 feet, the airplanes are well picked through. The really good wrecks start at 10,000 feet, because at that altitude, people are huffing and puffing, and they are not going to be picking up a lot of heavy metal. Above 10,000 feet, all they take is data plates and switches.”

Besides mad detective skills and cardiovascular bona fides, wreck chasing also demands next-level tenacity. Aviation journalist Nick Veronico was determined to find the Douglas R4D-8—a military version of the Super DC-3—that had crashed in his hometown of San Carlos, California, in 1945. “I spent 20 years going up and down the canyons in the foothills around here,” says Veronico, who is the author of two aptly named—and indispensable—books, Wreckchasing 101 and 102. “And then eBay came along, and somebody put up the crash photos from the Navy. Through those photos, we were able to find out which exact canyon it crashed in. It turned out to be a mile and three tenths from my house.” 

Like virtually every other aspect of modern life, wreck chasing has been reshaped by the advent of the internet and social media. Veronico created the Wreckchasing.com website in 1995; its message board gets more than 100,000 unique hits a month. “It’s built a community for people who are interested in wreck chasing,” he says. To protect crash sites from being overrun by looters, however, Veronico doesn’t publish geographical coordinates. 

Even so, barbarians are still storming the gates. “You have people posting wreck locations on YouTube, and you can easily reverse engineer what they did to get to those spots,” says Ryan Gilmore, who earned an archaeology degree but now works as a biological consultant and urban forester. “And before you know it, those wrecks are pretty much gone.”

Richardson understands the pack rat impulse. “When I was younger, I was like everybody else: I was looking for some little souvenir,” he admits. But his perspective changed over the years. In 2006, he helped establish the Colorado Aviation Historical Society’s aviation archaeology program. AvAr, as it’s known, holds symposia and leads searches to promote an enlightened and professional approach to a field that’s long been dominated by self-taught hobbyists.

 

“Our philosophy is that we do not remove anything from any of these sites,” he explains. “If you pick it up, you put it back where you found it. And if you need a souvenir, you take a picture. We’re trying to leave things as they were for the next generation and honor the people who generally died in these crashes. Our whole purpose is to not rewrite history, but to record it correctly.”

The Urge to Preserve

From the start, wreck chasing developed along two parallel tracks. One was dominated by amateurs motivated by personal satisfaction and/or performing a public service. The other was populated by treasure hunters searching for parts or entire airplanes that could be used for restoration projects. As you might imagine, the big complicated projects tended to be the work of cash-on-the-barrelhead types hoping to hit a jackpot at the end of the line. As Roy Stafford puts it with a chuckle: “Most of the really great archaeological finds had a—what’s the right word?—capitalist motivation.”

Stafford was the right man at the right time when the market for high-end warbirds matured in the 1980s. He’d flown Douglas A-4 Skyhawks and McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantoms in the U.S. Marine Corps (call-sign Shadow) and served as a maintenance officer, so he knew where the bodies—well, vintage airplanes—were buried. Eventually, he formed Black Shadow Aviation and started restoring vintage military airplanes on his own with a staff of 25. “I used to tell everybody, ‘I’m not in the aviation business—I’m in the monument business,’ ” he says.

The 1990s were the glory years for the airplane salvage industry, when adventurers like Gordon Page, who now runs the Spirit of Flight Foundation in Nampa, Idaho, made treks to Siberia to liberate forgotten fighters. But for the most part, and especially here in the U.S., the best terrestrial crash sites had been stripped. So collectors shifted their attention from land to sea. Thousands of airplanes had been lost in the water during the island-hopping war in the Pacific, and nearly as many had crashed during Navy aircraft carrier training in the U.S. The difficulty of reaching, much less recovering, these wrecks meant most of them were untouched. Also, many of the airplanes were well-preserved because cold water (deep in the ocean) and fresh water (in lakes) slowed metal deterioration.

Bob Mester was one of the pioneers of underwater aviation exploration. A diver who had been investigating shipwrecks for insurance companies, he expanded his horizons to include military aircraft at the behest of a P-51 owner. “I purchased a Klein 595 dual-frequency side-scan sonar,” says Mester. “It was the most money I’d ever spent in my life on a piece of equipment. And when it arrived, I didn’t even know how to open the box.” He later invested in submersibles, so-called “hard” suits for ultra-deep dives, and a host of digital technology. Mester’s greatest finds include a Douglas TBD-1 Devastator rescued from the coast of Florida and a Boeing B-17 recovered from a frozen lake in Labrador—a six-year project—now being restored to flyable condition. 

But the diver most closely—and controversially—associated with underwater recoveries is Taras Lyssenko. Like Mester, Lyssenko and his partner at A and T Recovery, Allan Olson, had been diving shipwrecks before switching to warbirds. After recovering a Grumman F4F Wildcat and a Douglas SBD Dauntless from Lake Michigan, they got a phone call from the new director of the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola. “He said, ‘Cease and desist, or I’ll put you in prison,’ ” says Lyssenko. “I said, ‘Go to hell.’ And he said, ‘No, but you’re going to work for us. Let’s get a lot of aircraft.’ And so, we went like gangbusters up until about 1996. And then the Naval History and Heritage Command shut us down.”

During World War II, a pair of Great Lakes side-wheel passenger steamers were retrofitted as in-land aircraft carriers and used for carrierqualification flights. More than 100 Navy airplanes had crashed and sank in Lake Michigan. From the late 1980s to 1996, with the backing of the National Naval Aviation Museum’s director, retired Navy captain  Robert Rasmussen, Lyssenko and Olson pulled about 30 airplanes from the water. Ultimately, A and T would recover from Lake Michigan three dozen Hellcats, Dauntlesses, Wildcats (both Grumman models and General Motors-built FM-2s), Vought F4U Corsairs, Grumman TBF Avengers, and the world’s only surviving Vought SB2U Vindicator. Even though many of the airplanes ended up in museums, the pace and volume of the recoveries raised concerns.

The U.S. Air Force had formally relinquished ownership of its airplanes that had crashed before 1961. The Navy, on the other hand, claimed ownership of its airplanes, no matter where they were found or what condition they were in. This position was challenged in court by would-be salvors. The legal arguments were complex and abstruse, weighing the rights of a sovereign nation against longstanding conventions governing maritime salvage. During the 1990s, several cases affirmed the Navy’s ownership of wrecked airplanes, which gutted the underwater recovery industry. A few years later, a private salvor discovered a Boeing B-29 Superfortress that had crashed into Lake Mead, Nevada, in 1948. The U.S. National Park Service sued to prevent the B-29 from being salvaged, and it’s still on the lakebed floor to this day—evidence of a second trend that’s fundamentally transformed the field. 

The first studies referring to aircraft as archaeological artifacts were published in the early 1980s, and by the 2000s, aviation archaeology was a thing. The conservation ethos that underpins the academic discipline of archaeology soon ran up against the warbird community’s preference for recovery and restoration. Inevitably, the tension led to a backlash against the then-commonplace practice of raiding aircraft carcasses for parts to be displayed in museums or used to build flyable airplanes stitched together from a mix of original, repurposed, and brand-new components.         

Instead of recovering military airplanes, aviation archaeologists now argue that the wreck sites themselves are worthy of preservation. Yes, they say, the airplanes are invaluable artifacts. But at the same time, the changes they’ve undergone due to pilferage, erosion, and other natural forces are significant elements of the historical and cultural record. “There are only a handful of known Avengers underwater right now,” says Jennifer McKinnon, a maritime archaeologist at East Carolina University who’s been studying one particular Avenger, perched on a reef off Saipan, for the past 15 years. “Our best strategy for preservation is to monitor them,” she says. “For example, we’ve been conducting corrosion studies, collecting environmental DNA samples from sea organisms to identify the microbiome, and making 3D models to understand the preservation and changes over time, and we can say with millimeter accuracy and quantitative data how the sites are holding up.”

Talk like this inspires denunciations from warbirders, the faintly pejorative term preservationists use to describe salvors and private collectors. “Aircraft archaeology is a fraud,” says Lyssenko. “They’re paper pushers who have destroyed so much American history. It’s sickening.”

To be sure, nature doesn’t spare wrecked aircraft, whether on the ground or underwater. For example, the Lake Mead B-29 was in pristine condition in 2001, when it was discovered by private salvors using side-scan sonar. Since then, the aluminum skin has been carpeted with an invasive species of mollusks known as quagga mussels.

Preservationists acknowledge that some deterioration is inevitable if airplanes are left in situ. But at the very least, they say, wreck sites can be protected from human depredations ranging from looting to graffiti. And steps are being taken to preserve artifacts digitally. Five years ago, National Park Service photographer Brett Seymour dove down to the Lake Mead B-29 with heavy-duty lights and high-definition cameras. “The process is called photogrammetry,” he says. “We shoot thousands and thousands of images and feed them into software that creates a three-dimensional, photorealistic model.” Very few people have the time or travel budgets, much less the scuba-diving skills, to visit underwater wrecks in person. But there’s hope that 3D imagery and augmented reality headsets will eventually enable enthusiasts to visit crash sites via virtual diving.

Although the Naval History and Heritage Command rarely issues permits these days to for-profit airplane salvors, nonprofits and universities continue to mount search expeditions under the aegis of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Established in 2015, DPAA is committed to repatriating the remains of those who served in the U.S. military. The agency conducts recovery operations with 750 staffers in 46 countries. But it often partners with specialist organizations such as Project Recover, which consists of a core of civilian volunteers collaborating with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Delaware’s College of Earth, Ocean & Environment. Current Project Recover CEO Derek Abbey volunteered for his first mission in Palau—site of some of the fiercest fighting in the Pacific—between deployments as a U.S. Marine Corps McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet weapon systems officer. The team would end up identifying a Vought F4U Corsair flown by a pilot missing in action since World War II, who happened to have been in Abbey’s own flight squadron, decades before Abbey’s service. “And so I was hooked,” he says. 

Project Recover has located and documented sites associated with 300 missing service members. To date, 18 have been repatriated. “This is one of the very few jobs that you get to bear witness to the impact that you’re creating on this world,” says Abbey. “But time is not our friend. Human encroachment is taking place, and erosion might make many of these sites undiscoverable. We’re doing everything we can to get as many teams into the field and conduct as many missions as possible to help families that have given too much and have waited too long to find answers of what happened to their loved ones.”

Generally speaking, amateur wreck chasers are equally determined to ease the suffering of the families of wreck victims. They often share personal belongings, such as wristwatches found at crash sites. They lead trips to accident locations. Pat Macha started Project Remembrance for this precise purpose. “One guy contacted me and said, ‘Have you been to my dad’s site?’ ” he recalls. “And I said, ‘Yes, I’ve been there.’ ‘Does anything remain there?’ And I said, ‘No, that site was completely sanitized.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I can sleep now.’ It was just eating him up.”

Maybe that’s why aviation archaeology exerts such a strong pull. Ultimately, it’s not about airplanes—it’s about people. People who are gone but not forgotten. It might turn out that Tony Romeo has discovered what happened to Amelia Earhart. If not, though, he’ll keep searching. And so will many others. 

---

A former daily newspaper reporter, Preston Lerner is a frequent contributor to Air & Space Quarterly.

This article was originally published with the title "Crash Course."

---

This article is from the Fall 2024 issue of Air & Space Quarterly, the National Air and Space Museum's signature magazine that explores topics in aviation and space, from the earliest moments of flight to today. Explore the full issue.

Want to receive ad-free hard-copies of Air & Space Quarterly? Join the Museum's National Air and Space Society to subscribe.