History found: Bomber that crashed in 1948 located at bottom of Lake Mead

Friday, Aug. 9, 2002 | 10:53 a.m.

Lake Mead has given up the secret of perhaps its most popular legend, as a crew of local divers say they have found and photographed a B-29 Superfortress bomber that crashed and sank 300 feet into the lake's waters 54 years ago.

The diving crew included former Army Col. Bo Gritz, a noted Vietnam POW seeker and government critic; his daughter, local deep rescue diver Melody Gritz; and rocket scientist Gregg Mikolasek, who used his boat equipped with a $25,000 side-scan sonar to find the lost giant warbird nicknamed "Beetle Bomb."

"It was a real team effort," said Bo Gritz of Sandy Valley, who was scheduled to hold a news conference today to release photos and 45 seconds of videotape of the plane.

The bomber was the subject of a 1990s federal lawsuit over salvage rights and has remained one of the lake's most enduring mysteries.

The 141,000-pound bomber -- the world's largest at the time, and first pressurized, four-engine aircraft, the type of which was used to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- mysteriously went down on July 21, 1948.

It was on a government mission to measure radioactive gamma rays. All five crew members were rescued.

The sophisticated radiation equipment along with the plane's other contents came to rest on the murky bottom of the vast reservoir that was created by the opening of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s. Why the plane crashed remains a mystery.

The plane has eluded searchers since.

"It is so deep and dark down there that even if you can get to it, you couldn't see the plane if it was directly in front of you without special equipment," Gritz said, explaining why the plane has never before been located even though the coordinates have long been known.

The National Park Service is taking the find seriously. Earlier this week, it contacted federal experts from the Submerged Resource Center -- the first underwater archeology team of the federal government -- to do a condition assessment and site documentation of the find.

The crew that found the plane is cooperating with the park service to ensure the preservation and protection of the find, park service officials said.

In September 1994, a federal court ruled that the plane had been abandoned by the Air Force and belonged to the Park Service. The court threw out claims from a Florida company that proposed to salvage the plane, clean it up and turn it into an attraction that would potentially generate millions of dollars.

Lake Mead Park Rangers spokeswoman Carla Norris said no permit was required to search for the plane or photograph it. However, she said, it is illegal to remove any debris that could be construed as artifacts from the downed plane.

Gritz, who made one of the dives to view the plane, said no artifacts were disturbed.

Gritz, who just completed his new book, "My Brother's Keeper," said the crew's goal was to demonstrate a rekindling of America's adventurism as we recover from last September's terrorist attacks.

"The horrific terrorist attacks using skyjacked American airliners fired a need within Americans everywhere to do more than talk about helping to heal the pain felt for helpless victims," Gritz said. "The B-29 in Lake Mead had long been a topic of discussion."

Earlier this year, Bo and Melody Gritz, armed with accident report information, used their Twin Cessna aircraft to repeat the ill-fated flight, short of crashing it into the lake.

They determined the Beetle Bomb was in an area about 20 miles from Overton Arm, near Napoleon's Tomb. Mikolasek's state-of-the-art sonar located images of "a large symmetrical shape complete with a high tail and long wings," Gritz said.

"Without Gregg, the bomber wouldn't have been found," Gritz said, noting that his daughter, a medical technician diver who has located and pulled bodies from the lake, was among the first people to see the plane since it sank.

Steffan Schultz of Martinez, Calif., an experienced underwater photographer, used his robotic camera and high-powered lighting to film the aircraft, including the 30-foot tail with the plane's identification numbers.

"The team proved that intelligent, determined Americans, working together, can do just about anything," Gritz said.

The mystery of the sunken B-29 began with its morning takeoff from Armitage Field in Inyokern, Calif., 140 miles west of Las Vegas. Over the lake, one of the engines caught fire and the plane hit the water, skipped a quarter of a mile and sank in 15 minutes, the Boulder City News reported at the time.

Only one crew member was injured when he broke an arm. A passing plane spotted the men floating in two rubber rafts at 3:30 p.m. and dispatched a rescue boat. They were rescued at 5:45 p.m.

Gritz said he wonders what the future will hold for the sunken craft now that it has been located -- whether it will one day be salvaged or will remain in its watery grave. Gritz says the crew is keeping the exact location a secret so fortune hunters don't attempt to loot it.

Park Service officials say plans have long been to leave the B-29 where it is.