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RedditOn a barge in lake mead, in Nevada, under a scorching sun, Dave Conlin pulled on long underwear, wool socks and a fleece jacket and pants. He donned an insulated drysuit over all that, strapped two scuba tanks to his back and slung another under one arm. It was so much gear—weighing nearly 200 pounds—that he needed help standing up. His boyish face compressed in a thick neoprene dive hood, Conlin duck-walked to the edge of the barge and stepped into the water.
Plunging in after Conlin, who is an underwater archaeologist with the National Park Service's Submerged Resources Center (SRC), were fellow archaeologist Matt Russell and photographer Brett Seymour, both with the SRC, and Jeff Bozanic, a technical diver under contract to the National Park Service. Bobbing at the surface, the four double-checked their gear and descended into the darkness in a trail of bubbles.
One hundred seventy feet below lay the wreckage of a B-29 bomber. It crashed in 1948 while on a top-secret mission to test components for a missile-guidance system. After World War II, this B-29, known by its serial number, 45-21847, had been stripped of its armaments and fitted with a Sun Tracker, an experimental sensor unit that, when perfected, would allow missiles to navigate by the sun. The cold war was heating up, and the U.S. military wanted missiles that could not be jammed from the ground, as the radar- and radio-guided missiles of the time could be. The Sun Tracker was a precursor to the systems that guide today's cruise missiles.
On July 21, 1948, the bomber took off from Inyokern, California, with a crew of five and climbed to 30,000 feet over the desert, where civilian scientist John Simeroth took measurements of solar radiation to calibrate the Sun Tracker. The plane was making a low pass over the dead-calm surface of Lake Mead when it struck the water at 230 miles per hour, ripping off three engines and setting fire to the fourth. (Pilot error was later found to be the cause.) The plane skipped like a stone, but the pilot, Capt. Robert Madison, put it down safely. The crew escaped into life rafts and were rescued later that day; the worst injury was Sgt. Frank Rico’s broken arm.
In 2001, a private dive team searching for the B-29 using sidescan sonar found the wreck in the northern arm of Lake Mead. Because the bomber lies inside a National Recreation Area, responsibility for the site fell to the National Park Service. The SRC has been surveying the site and preparing it for amateur divers willing to brave the frigid depths for a glimpse of a cold war relic.
As Conlin later described it, a quick descent took them to the plane, which rests right side up, its nose cowling crushed and its back broken, but otherwise in remarkably good condition. Its aluminum skin, lit by powerful dive lights suspended from the barge, shone faintly in the greenish murk. Rectangular holes in the tail show where the fabric coverings were torn away.
The research team sets to work, with Seymour shooting video of Russell to use in an orientation film for visiting divers. Bozanic and Conlin attached tape measures to the plane, from wingtip to wingtip and from the top of the fuselage to where it disappeared into the muddy lake bottom. The operators of a small ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) fitted with an electrochemical probe and a video feed will use the measuring tapes as a reference as they guide the ROV around the wreck. They will take readings every foot to measure how much the bomber's surface is corroding in the water.
From one of the bomber's engine enclosures hangs another probe, installed on an earlier dive, that collects data every five minutes, including temperature, salinity and the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water. "This all tells us something about the corrosive environment," says Russell. The team is also documenting the plane’s current condition. "We're establishing a base line so that we can come back in two, five or ten years and see what the visitor impact has been."
