New search opens for plane carrying 3 that crashed in Michigan’s Lake Superior in 1968
An unmanned high-tech boat equipped with sonar and cameras sets out to solve the mystery surrounding a 1968 plane crash that killed three people on a scientific mission near Lake Superior in Michigan.
Seat cushions and bits of stray metal have washed ashore for decades. But the wreck of the Beechcraft Queen Air and the remains of the three men have never been found in the extremely deep water.
An autonomous vessel, known as the Armada 8, was in a channel en route to Lake Superior on Monday, accompanied by boats and crew from Michigan Tech University’s Great Lakes Research Center in Houghton on the Upper Peninsula.
“We know it’s in this general vicinity,” Wayne Lusardi, the state’s maritime archaeologist, told reporters. “It’s going to be a difficult search. But we have the technology here and the experts to use that technology.”
The plane carrying pilot Robert Carew, co-pilot Gordon Jones and doctoral student Velayudh Krishna was en route from Madison, Wisconsin, to Lake Superior on October 23, 1968. They were collecting temperature and water radiation data for the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
The pilot’s last contact that day was his communication with the Houghton County Airport. Searches that fall and in 1969 failed to turn up the wreckage.
“It was just a mystery,” Lusardi said.
He said relatives of the three men have been informed of the new search.
It is not known what will happen if the wreckage is found. Although the goal is to find a missing plane, Michigan authorities generally do not allow shipwrecks on the bottom of the Great Lakes to be disturbed.
This isn’t a solo mission. The autonomous craft will also map a portion of the bottom of Lake Superior, a vast body of water covering 31,700 square miles (82,100 square kilometers).
The search is organized by the Smart Ships Coalitiona collaboration of more than 60 universities, government agencies, companies and international organizations interested in autonomous maritime technologies.
“Hopefully we’ll have good news soon and find the plane wreckage,” said David Naftzger, executive director of the Great Lakes Governors in St. Lawrence & Prime Ministers, a group of American states and Canadian provinces.
“Either way, we will have a successful mission at the end of this week that shows a new application for technology, new things found on the bottom of the lake in an area that has never been explored in this way before,” Naftzger said.
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