Who Owns These Planes?

Once an interesting aircraft wreck is found and properly identified, considerable effort is made to accurately photograph and document the site. Prior to removal, permission must be obtained from the local land owner. Tidewater Tech has been quite successful in having several such crashes just donated to the school for their own use.

However, if the remains are on public land, it becomes much more complex and sometimes extremely difficult. Federal and State park services all have their own procedures for obtaining permission to recover anything within their boundaries. Often this can be simplified by the tact of removing this non-natural and man-made intrusion in their pristine wilderness. In fact, this might be thought of as an environmental clean up of a natural area.

The former Army Air Corps, now Air Force, expresses little if any control over these old crashes. Their major interest is that there are no human remains from former crewmen involved and that there are no dangerous ordinance or weapon systems. The Navy takes a completely different position. They contend that all aircraft, like their ships, are continuously and forever still owned by the United States Navy. They warn that disturbing these crash sites, recovering parts of an airplane, or raising a submerged aircraft is a violation of federal law that they fully intend to prosecute. There is some question as to their jurisdiction over an obviously abandoned wreckage that might have been resting on private property for the last half century. Most time their own historical documents even show the destroyed aircraft as being stricken from their records.

Some states have asserted ownership through their own states legislation enacting antiquity laws regarding historic airplane crashes over fifty years old. Alaska has lain claim to a lot of abandoned civilian and military aircraft through this method. Japanese and American warplanes in the Aleutian Islands are protected by still another law, declaring the entire area and its artifacts as a former war zone and protected region.

Most often, many of these problems can be avoided by receiving proper written authorization and the granting of ownership by the land owner and anyone else that might lay a claim to such an aircraft. Most likely, it is also important as to the intentions of the recipient. Legal and ethical organizations should normally not experience any problem in receiving full cooperation and assistance in the proper recovery of such aircraft that are going to be used for a valid purpose.