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A high-tech unmanned boat outfitted with sonar and cameras will try to solve the mystery of a 1968 plane crash that killed three people who were on a scientific assignment at Michigan’s Lake Superior.
Seat cushions and pieces of stray metal have washed ashore over decades. But the wreckage 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 headed toward Lake Superior on Monday, joined by boats and crew from Michigan Tech University’s Great Lakes Research Center in Houghton in the state’s Upper Peninsula.
“We know it’s in this general vicinity,” Wayne Lusardi, the state’s maritime archaeologist, told reporters. “It will be a difficult search. But we have the technology amassed right here and the experts to utilize that technology.”
The plane carrying pilot Robert Carew, co-pilot Gordon Jones and graduate student Velayudh Krishna was traveling to Lake Superior from Madison, Wisconsin, on Oct. 23, 1968. They were collecting data on temperature and water radiation 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 did not reveal the wreckage.
“It was just a mystery,” Lusardi said.
He said family members of the three men are aware of the new search.
It’s not known what would happen if the wreckage is located. Although the goal is to find a missing plane, Michigan authorities typically do not allow shipwrecks to be disturbed on the bottom of the Great Lakes.
This isn’t a solo mission. The autonomous vessel will also be mapping a section of the bottom of Lake Superior, a vast body of water with a surface area of 31,700 square miles (82,100 square kilometers).
The search is being organized by the Smart Ships Coalition, a grouping of more than 60 universities, government agencies, companies and international organizations interested in maritime autonomous technologies.
“Hopefully we’ll have great news quickly and we’ll find the plane wreck,” said David Naftzger, executive director of the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Governors & Premiers, a group of U.S. states and Canadian provinces.
“Regardless, we will have a successful mission at the end of this week showing a new application for technology, new things found on the lakebed in an area that’s not been previously surveyed in this way,” Naftzger said.
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