Divers hope to use two 50-calibre machine guns to help identify the sunken wreck of a US bomber in the Baltic Sea.
The dive team hopes to use the machine guns to identify the wreck of the B-17 Flying Fortress. Experts believe the aircraft crashed more than 80 years ago in 1943. They hope to be able to identify the aircraft and its crew.
The team is working alongside the US Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), which aims to identify and recover the remains of over 81,000 US service personnel who have died in wars around the world.
Describing the diving conditions and effort, nautical archaeology graduate student Bethany Becktell stated:
“There is no obvious plane, but rather a debris scatter. Objects come into view as we strategically swim around the area, marking visible wreckage on dive-slates with compass-bearings and taking photographs with a GoPro camera. Ammunition generates almost constant pings on the metal-detector we use to search for buried material. Scattered debris that identifies the site as a plane become clearer; engines are visible, as well as parts of a wing, a cockpit window, a tire and a fuel-tank.”
Katie Custer Bojakowski, an instructional assistant professor of anthropology, added:
“On the aircraft wreckage, it’s really important to find the machine-guns.They are a controlled item in the military and so are not only stamped with a serial number but their location on any given aircraft was also tightly controlled throughout the war.”
While Texas A&M University’s Dr. Piotr Bojakowski added:
“It’s an exciting process to see a crash site under water. Even though it’s in ruins, you begin to visualize the entire aircraft with the engine and wings and fuel-tanks. You slowly start piecing everything together in a way that makes sense, and understand what happened.”
Discussing the importance of the site, he added:
“We want to investigate the case not just as an archaeological site; we want to understand what happened and bring closure to the families. It is a unique experience that requires a lot of archaeological work and careful investigation of all individual pieces to provide the best answers.”
