AVIATION MYSTERIES
Glenn Miller aircraft found?
English fisherman’s 32-year-old story may be true, TIGHAR says
By Julie Summers Walker
On December 15, 1944, at the height of the U.S. involvement in World War II, 38-year-old Big Band performer Alton Glenn Miller was flying in a Noorduyn UC–64 Norseman over the English Channel to a performance in Paris when the aircraft disappeared. It was never found. Speculation ranged from bombs to carburetor ice—even to Miller being a secret agent—but the disappearance has remained a mystery. Now, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) claims the story of an English fisherman recovering a mangled airframe in the channel may be true. In 1987, the Englishman said he discovered an aircraft in his trawler’s fishing nets but was advised to put it back by the Weymouth, England, Coast Guard station as it could be considered a “war grave.”
“Pulling up a wreck that might contain human remains is considered very bad luck,” said Richard Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR. “Getting rid of it without cutting the net was easier said than done and it took about two hours, during which time the boat drifted. Finally, one wing separated and floated away, making it easier to free the aircraft. He carefully noted the navigational coordinates of where he dropped the wreck.”
TIGHAR attempted to contact the Coast Guard station, but it has closed. The fisherman, now long retired, told his story to a museum in the United Kingdom and sketched the aircraft he claims to have caught in his net. The museum gave the information to Gillespie.
“It’s what we do. We investigate famous aviation historical mysteries as a way to explore, demonstrate, and teach the scientific method of inquiry,” Gillespie said. “We think of people like Amelia Earhart, Glenn Miller, and Nungesser and Coli [the French transatlantic flyers lost 10 days before Lindbergh’s flight] as our clients. Our goal is to change mystery to history.”
The aircraft—a steel tube fuselage with a fabric covering and wood wings—would be deteriorated beyond recognition after 74 years in the sea. Gillespie says if an airplane of that construction could be identified as having a Wasp engine, it’s Miller’s airplane. But money, research, and looking at the seafloor 130 feet below the surface in a busy shipping lane are just several of the obstacles to any discovery.
“Once you say, ‘We’re going to go out and find the Glenn Miller airplane,’ everyone holds their breath,” Gillespie told People magazine. “It’s a crapshoot. This stuff is really hard and there’s a good chance you’re going to get skunked. That’s what this game is like. You can’t find something if you don’t try to find it, but that’s the call we’re going to have to make.”
Email [email protected]
Web: tighar.org/Projects/GlennMiller
AVIATION HISTORY
Accidental hero
Others had tried, but Lucky Lindy made it so
By Julie Summers Walker
Although the Wright brothers had proved manned flight more than 20 years before, it was not until a young Minnesota pilot flew nonstop in a windshieldless aircraft across the Atlantic Ocean that aviation became the world’s newest fascination. “We’d been standing on our heads to get them to notice us but after Lindbergh, suddenly everyone wanted to fly,” said Elinor Smith Sullivan in 1927. “After Lindbergh” was the flight of the Spirit of St. Louis, Charles A. Lindbergh’s historic 33.5-hour flight from New York’s Roosevelt Field to LeBourget Aerodrome outside Paris, on May 20 and 21, 1927.
Like Smith Sullivan, herself the youngest licensed pilot in the world at age 16 in 1927, Lindbergh and others had been testing the limits of the “aeroplane” for many years, ever since the events in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, in 1903 when Orville Wright flew for 12 seconds and 120 feet. Lindbergh had been flying since 1923, having previously been a wing walker, parachutist, and aircraft mechanic. Lindbergh soloed in May 1923 in a Curtiss Jenny he had bought for $500. He was a barnstormer, became a flight instructor, and was one of the first to fly mail across the country.
In 1919, two British aviators had flown an Atlantic crossing—from New Brunswick, Canada, to Ireland—prompting Augustus Post, the secretary of the Aero Club of America, to propose to New York hotelier Raymond Orteig the awarding of a prize for an American aviator to fly the transatlantic route nonstop. By 1924, several attempts had been made, but none successfully. Orteig reinstated the prize in 1927, and 25-year-old Lindbergh convinced Ryan Airlines to build him a monoplane for $10,580 (the lowest bidder).
Taking off from Roosevelt Field at 7:52 a.m., Lindbergh had 450 gallons of fuel aboard, stared at a blank black wall in front of him while seated in a wicker chair, and had no means of communication. The 3,600-mile flight took him 10,000 feet in the clouds and as low as 10 feet above waves on the ocean. When he landed at 10:22 p.m. outside Paris, he could not see the throngs of people waiting to greet him. More than 150,000 people swarmed the young pilot, and aviation was never the same.
“People were behaving as though Lindbergh had walked on water, not flown over it,” biographer A. Scott Berg would write some 70 years later.
Excerpted from Freedom to Fly: AOPA and the History of General Aviation in America, published by AOPA on the occasion of its eightieth anniversary. You can buy the book here:
