Dauntless plane
Towing would explain the winch on the bottom of the wreckage. It described how the Dauntless was towing a target tube that day, and another piece of the puzzle fell into place. The records included an ID number for the plane, which enabled him to track down the accident report.
Stalter learned from a friend about some World War II records, and in those found an entry describing the Aug. “There are lots of planes out there,” said Taras Lyssenko, a Chicago businessman whose A & T Recovery has pulled dozens of World War II wrecks out of Lake Michigan and other places, including an SB2C-4 Helldiver plucked from the bottom of Lower Otay Reservoir in 2010. He could find only one plane that had that motor and those flaps: the Dauntless. He suspected it was from World War II because of the radial engine - it was replaced on later planes - and started researching. The wings had unusual air brakes, perforated flaps attached along the back edge. There was a winch on the bottom, with a piece of steel cable still attached. It was mostly in pieces, but he could make out the fuselage, upside down in the sand. ‘Hallowed sites’Ĭoming back up from his dive last October, Stalter wondered what kind of airplane he’d found. When a crash boat arrived, they found debris in the water: an oxygen bottle, three rolled-up and singed towing tubes, and two gloves. Witnesses saw the plane spin to the right, then spin to the left, and then hit the water. Their job that day was to “stream a sleeve” - tow a nylon tube that would be used by gunners in other planes for target practice.Īt about 10:30 a.m., they were 2,000 feet up off the coast of San Diego.
His wife had just joined him in San Diego. Moore had been married earlier in the year in his hometown of Bloomington, Ill. Parks, who was from New Orleans, had been flying for about a year. and Aviation Radioman Richard Harold Moore climbed into an SBD-3 Dauntless at NAS San Diego. About 2,400 of them are still listed as missing by the federal Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. And the pilots less experienced.Ībout 15,000 aviators were killed in stateside training accidents during the war. The planes were more worn out, the replacement parts less plentiful. Training wasn’t as dangerous as aerial combat, but it still had risks. “It helped change the direction of the war.”Īircraft designers kept making improvements to the Dauntless - longer flight range, better armament - and the older planes got rotated back to the U.S. “For the first half of the war in the Pacific, the Dauntless was the most effective American weapons system,” said Karl Zingheim, historian for the USS Midway, the carrier-turned-museum in San Diego that’s named for the battle. In early June of 1942, at the Battle of Midway, Dauntless bombers flying off American aircraft carriers wrecked four Japanese carriers and a cruiser. The SBD stood for “Scout Bomber Douglas” but air crews joked that the initials really stood for “Slow But Deadly.” And deadly it was. They trained in seaplanes like the PBY Catalina and fighters like the Hellcat and dive bombers like the SBD Dauntless. Thousands of pilots trained at what was known then as Naval Air Station San Diego before shipping off to overseas combat. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, North Island had cemented its place as the pre-eminent spot on the West Coast for Navy fliers. They eventually shifted their attention to a carrier-led force, basing the first flat-top, the Langley, here in 1922.īy the time the United States entered World War II after the Dec. He offered to instruct pilots for free, and the success of the training convinced the admirals that airplanes had a future in the service. San Diego and Naval aviation go way back, to 1911 and a flying school run by Glenn Curtiss on Coronado’s North Island.