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Found: The plane wreck that could solve a 50-year-old mystery

 
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12/30/2018 03:01 PM
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Found: The plane wreck that could solve a 50-year-old mystery
It's taken 10 years, but professional diver Grahame Knott has finally found a US Air Force plane that crashed into the Channel in 1969. The wreck may help resolve a mystery: did the homesick mechanic who made off with the aircraft from his base in Suffolk lose control - or was he shot down?

"It cost me a fortune in beer," says Grahame Knott, "and I had to filter out a lot of chuff."

A crucial part of his decade of research was spent in pubs along the south coast of England, looking for men who operated trawlers and scallop dredgers.

These boats scrape nets along the seabed and occasionally turn up curious pieces of metal - which is what Knott was buying beer to hear about.

By listening carefully, he could guess whether the objects were likely to have come from aircraft, and if so how old they were, though it was not always easy to know exactly where they had become snagged in the net

The Channel is littered with wrecks from the two world wars and the fishermen often assumed, incorrectly, that these were what Knott was looking for. But eventually, with the information he acquired, he was able to narrow down his initial 100 sq mile search zone to five target areas in a 30 sq mile patch of sea.

There was no dramatic Eureka moment, Knott recalls, more of a slow realisation that they had made their longed-for discovery.

First, sonar readings told them they had found an object of interest. They then lowered a video camera to within 2m of it so they could take a look. This confirmed it was aluminium, because of the distinctive way the metal corrodes.

"Then we spotted a wheel sticking out the sand, then a section of wing with rivets, it just got bigger and bigger," says Knott.

This was it, the Hercules that had gone missing on 23 May 1969.


In 1969, Sergeant Paul Meyer was a US Air Force mechanic based at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk.

At 23 he was already a Vietnam veteran and he was deeply unhappy - homesick for his wife and stepchildren and struggling with alcohol. His request to return to a USAF base in Langley, Virginia, had been turned down.

On the fateful night of 22 May 1969 something snapped. He drank heavily at a party and was then arrested for being drunk and disorderly. He was escorted back to his barracks and told to sleep it off.

Instead, using the assumed name "Capt Epstein", Meyer managed to take charge of aircraft 37789, a Hercules transporter C-130.

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