Unmanned Vessel Searches Lake Superior for Site of 1968 Plane Crash

by Edwin Torres, age 13

An airplane carrying three researchers unexpectedly crashed into the waters of Lake Superior on Oct. 23, 1968. Since then, parts of the plane have drifted to the surface, but little is known about what exactly happened to the crew and plane.

A team of researchers from Michigan Tech University (MTU) attempted to solve the decade-old mystery. They have used a boat with sonar and cameras to map the bottom part of Lake Superior, which is the largest freshwater lake in the world. With depths of up to 1,300 feet, the lake is home to numerous shipwrecks. Additionally, the Armada 8, an autonomous vessel, searched Lake Superior.

On that day in 1968, the pilot of the plane, Robert Carew, co-pilot Gordon Jones, and student, Velayudh Krishna were heading to Lake Superior from Madison, Wisconsin. They were gathering data on the temperature and the water radiation of the lake.

How the crash occurred is still a mystery, said Travis White, an engineer at MTU. He was on a boat with monitors capturing real-time results from the vessel. White and his crew said that bright colors were a sign of a plane crash.

On a livestream from Lake Superior, he stated, “Any wrecked aircraft is treated very much similar to a wrecked ship in the Great Lakes. It won't be disturbed. What we’re trying to do is document its location and condition and try to provide as much of an answer as we can to the question of what happened.”

The search was run by Smart Ships Coalition, a group of various universities, and organizations interested in autonomous technologies. Although parts of the plane have been recovered, there have been no signs of locating the remains of the plane crash victims.

[Source: Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel]