For 53 years ago, a small plane with five men on board vanished during a snowy night flight in north-eastern USA. Now, the plane is believed to have been found – at the bottom of a lake.
The plane took off from an airfield in Burlington, Vermont, on 27 January 1971, for a short business trip to Rhode Island. But shortly after take-off, it disappeared from radar systems.
Search efforts in the winter weather yielded no results. It wasn't until the following spring that a few suspicious wreckage parts were found on a mountain top, and it was assumed that the plane had crashed and all on board had perished. A total of 17 major search efforts have been made over the years, without success.
A group of volunteers went through echosounder images of Lake Champlain in northern Vermont, which is in an area where the plane was last seen on radar. They found four anomalies on the lake bed and began investigating them with a remotely operated underwater robot in May this year.
At a depth of 60 metres, they found a plane wreckage with a paint job that matches the missing plane.
Not knowing for 53 years whether the plane was in the lake or perhaps on a mountain somewhere nearby has been painful, says Frank Wilder, whose dad was on the ill-fated flight.
He expresses relief, but stresses that many questions still remain about what happened to the plane. Relatives of the five presumed deceased men are now planning a memorial service by the lake.
