Searchers in California say they have found and identified the wreck of a fighter jet that disappeared into the Pacific Ocean near Los Angeles International Airport nearly 54 years ago.
The searchers were looking for another missing plane when they came upon the wreckage of a Lockheed T-33A jet trainer, said Pat Macha, an aircraft archeologist who has identified about 3,700 crash sites and visited more than 800.
The discovery started this year near Austin, Texas, where computer expert Gary Fabian found “what looked like a few little pixels” on a high-definition U.S. Geological Survey image of the Santa Monica Bay ocean floor.
Fabian is the founder of a group of unpaid sleuths who discovered a missing World War I German U-boat off the California coast in 2003. The group, known as UB88.org, has continued to search for other wrecks.
From Texas, Fabian sent the map info to Ray Arntz, owner and operator of a southern California dive company and a fellow member of UB88.org.
Arntz and some his employees set out to search three wrecks using side-scan sonar. Two turned out to be boats. They weren’t sure about the third.
“I just grabbed a tank and went down to look at it,” Arntz said.
He saw a fairly compact debris field with a lot of aluminum, which indicated that it was an airplane. Then he saw landing gear.
” ‘It’s an airplane,’ I said to myself. ‘How do we go from here?’ ”
A manufacturer’s number on a feed mechanism for a 50-caliber machine gun started him and the others toward piecing together what they had found.
The manufacturer’s number indicated that it was a T-33 Shooting Star. Researching government documents, the searchers found that a T-33 had disappeared in the area.
“It just matched what we had,” Arntz said. “The T-33 was it.”
That was about a month ago. The searchers kept quiet about their find until family members could be notified. Macha said he spoke with a relative of one of the two crew members a few days ago.
The Air Force accident report identifies the pilots as Lt. Richard Martin Theiler and Lt. Paul Dale Smith. Theiler had 1,244 hours of flying experience, and Smith had 430.
Another volunteer group called Missing Aircraft Search Team also helped find the wreckage.
There are 2,500 crash sites in California, he said, where all or parts of an airplane still remain. Some of them are chronicled on his Web site, http://www.aircraftwrecks.com
Source: CNN.com
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October 1, 2009 at 12:42 am