Where to Start Looking

Most opportunities to find such airplanes are outside the United States in foreign countries. This is especially true if it is an area where intense aerial combat took place during the war. That obviously allows greater chance for accidental crashes or combat losses. The more remote and desolate an area, the greater the chance for finding aircraft remains. Such regions that have remote and undeveloped sections are normally third world countries or those of lesser economic capabilities. They are sparsely populated, where the value of aluminum as scrap metal is highly prized. Local villagers often tear up and destroy any airplane remains, digging out all parts that can be used in their daily existence. It is not unusual to have more damage done to an airplane after the crash than the actual accident itself.

Almost all governments keep fairly accurate crash records of all accidents or those planes lost in battle. Quite often, their estimate of the exact location is somewhat limited. The US Air Force has over fifty thousand accident reports available of the war years just in the United States. These range from the occasional airplane landing at their home base without lowering their landing wheels to a whole group of P-40 fighters that flew together into a mountain ridge in California. These can be obtained from the Air Force base at Maxwell Air Force base.

In those years prior to the abundance of heavy lifting helicopters, many of these aircraft were just abandoned in the swamp or mountain tops where they crashed. It was just not practical to try and remove the airplane, unless it occurred alongside an easily accessible road. The war effort was going full steam and with defense plants pumping out dozens of new planes each day, it was less expensive to just replace a damaged airframe with a new one. If anything was attempted, it was usually to remove the weapon systems such as machine guns or live ordinance and destroy or recover sensitive electronic communication equipment and navigation radios.

Relatively intact airplanes with very little damage can still be found in many lakes, rivers, or along the shallow waters of the coast line. Such emergency landings in the water were rarely if ever recovered except to remove the pilot remains from a badly mangled wreckage. There are hundreds of airplanes that lay on the bottom of Lake Michigan as a result of accidents during training for Navy carrier landings. Most of these were mechanical failures or young inexperienced pilots getting lost or running out of fuel. Several aircraft have been recovered and are flying again today with much less restoration work needed than normal.

Aluminum planes lying undisturbed several hundred feet in fresh water do not experience as much damage as expected. Some metals like magnesium seem to deteriorate faster, while others come out of the water looking like new. Tidewater Tech uses a side scan sonar system to search for such crashes. The pc based system is built by Marine Sonic Technology and uses a 300 kHz tow fish. It is easiest to begin by asking a local fisherman about "hang site logs", which are records of where their nets or equipment have gotten snagged on sunken objects like plane crashes or submerged boats. The process has been quite successful and several airplanes have been found. It is then a matter of determining the probable restoration value of the remains and whether it would be worthwhile to expend the expense of recovering such a submerged aircraft.

Salt water has a much more destructive effect on aircraft and it would be extremely rare to be able to restore them for future flight. There were hundreds of former lend lease aircraft dumped off the coast of Australia in about six to eight hundred feet of water. The few that have been pulled up were severely corroded and might only be of limited value to rebuild as static displays with badly gutted insides. There is just too much loss of metal from fifty years of damaging salt water.

As the war drew to an end, almost all these military airplanes were scrapped and melted down for their aluminum value. Jets had just been developed and they were the future of military aviation. There were major centers set up throughout America to efficiently dispose of these thousands of excess propeller airplanes. However, in many cases, there were just too many to handle.

There are documented cases of dozens of aircraft dumped into trenches and just buried. Hundreds of American planes were pushed into a ravine in the Philippines and covered with dirt at Clark Air Force base, because there was no other efficient method of disposing of them. Transportation costs to smelters in the United States were often higher than the scrap value of the metal.

Another unusual example of this process is south of Indianapolis, where Tidewater Tech has recovered a small warehouse full of former German Luftwaffe aircraft parts that were buried on a former military airfield. This was a secret test and evaluation center for captured foreign military aircraft. When the war ended, the airplanes were donated to numerous museums and today are on display in the Smithsonian and other prominent government collections.

However, they had duplicate versions of several aircraft that were no longer flyable and tons of spare parts. Using a Subsurface Interface Radar system built by Geophysical Survey Systems, the school has been able to find some of the spare parts, but not yet located an entirely intact airplane. This base is huge and most of the year leased out to farmers that plant their crops on the hundreds of acres.