Introduction
If you have been following along, we have been trying to find the S-3 Viking that crashed off Point Loma in 1978. A brief rundown of previous posts:
- Original AUV Search
- Second AUV Search
- First Day of Dives – Mystery Plane
- First Day of Dives – Wing Section
- Second Day of Dives
- Third Day of Dives
On the fourth day of diving I was out with Ross Overstreet on the Marissa and we planned to do a couple more dives. The first dive was to look at the “Mystery Plane” again to see if we could locate the engine to help identify it. The second dive we were going to use the sonar to look at some of the debris fields but likely dive the target we thought might be the other wing.
We had amazing conditions underwater. The visibility at depth was probably 50 feet. The surface wasn’t great and was choppy with some wind and cold and overcast.
Dive 1 – Mystery Plane
We think that this is a Corsair (or possibly two different planes) and we wanted to find the engine to help identify the wreck. Ross tied into the downline and used his scooter to look around for debris and I followed and took pictures. We did find a couple new sections of debris but did not find the engine. We found one object that might be the cage that contained the engine with the engine buried in the sand underneath but we aren’t sure. We also found another section of wreck which has a lot of equipment buried under the seaweed that bears further investigation.
Is this the engine mount with the engine buried in the sand beneath?
Below is a short video clip of that same debris piece:
We believe that this is the fuel filling point on the wing of the Corsair:
Close-up of the landing gear assembly and tire:
This is what we think is the “bomb displacement device”:
This is a short video of the same debris:
Below is a good picture of the main fuselage section. You can really get a sense of how clear the water was and the nice blue color. I wish it was like this year-round!
Dive 2 – Wing Section
After looking at quite a few of the debris fields that showed up in the AUV sonar images, we decided to dive what we thought would be the “other” wing from the one that we found earlier. It was about 400 feet away. We didn’t see much fish on the sonar from the boat but trusted the AUV and did a “dead drop” on the coordinates of the target.
I got down to the bottom and saw some fish and shadows 5-10 feet away and went over to investigate. I knew immediately that it was the “other” wing section and took a bunch of photos in order to build a photogrammetry model. Ross went off on his scooter and ended up going east and ran into an airplane tire and some small metal bits (which corresponds to the “Small Debris” field shown in the image above.
Below is a screen capture of the “second” wing section that we found:
To compare, here is an image of the first wing section we found:
A few notes about these two wing sections:
- They are very long and narrow wings
- It might not be immediately obvious, but I am pretty sure they are the same type of wing
- The leading edge angles are the same
- They are both long and “skinny”
- The “first” wing has a bunch of material which looks like a firehose (or lifting strap)
- They are “only” about 400 feet apart
Based on the above, we believe that they are from the same airplane. Given the long, narrow wing shape, we now believe that they are not from a S-3 Viking which is unfortunate. There is very little debris in between the two wing sections AND there is a potential lift strap on one of the wings; therefore, we think that the wreck might have been partially salvaged.
We have been researching possible wrecks and have two potential airplane types: P2V Neptune or S2 Tracker. I think it looks more like a S2F Tracker wing shape and we found an accident of one but it was listed as closer to shore than this one and is too shallow. We still think there is a chance that it is from a Neptune and there are a few recorded accidents of that airplane type in the general area.
Next Steps
We have mostly exhausted the targets in the first and second set of AUV scans. We have found two wings that are probably from the same airplane but not from the Viking and we found the “Mystery Airplane” wreck that we are still trying to identify. The next step is likely to deploy the AUV again to the west of the current search area. We are currently hoping to do that early in January.
