Graham Jaehnig/Daily Mining Gazette The scientists and crew of Michigan Tech’s GLRC RV Soliton are L to R, Travis White, research engineer; Wayne Lusardi, underwater archaeologist with MDNR; Jenna DeVries, GLRV marine instrumentation intern; and Jamey Anderson, assistant director of Marine Operations.

HOUGHTON – The search for a National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) plane that disappeared near Freda some 57 years ago is the subject of underwater archaeology investigation this week. The NCAR plane disappeared on Oct. 23, 1968 while collecting water radiation temperatures over Lake Superior. NCAR pilots Gordon Jones and Robert Carew were on board that day with Velayudh Krishna, a graduate student from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Despite search efforts conducted immediately after the plane disappeared, and a more thorough one nine months later, no trace of the aircraft or the three men on board has been found.

Travis White, research engineer at Michigan Technological University’s Great Lakes Research Center (GLRC) is in charge of the search, which is the next phase of a search begun last September. “The project has been a really big collaboration,”said White.

The GLRC has been working with Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers and the Smart Ships Coalition to assist in pulling together all the partners and funding.

“It’s been a real boot strap in terms of funding,” White said. “We’ve done a lot with a little, in terms of actual money, but fortunately, Michigan Tech has the equipment and we are also fortunate to have a partnership with Ocean Infinity, which provided the autonomous surface vessel last year, and we also partnered with NORBIT and Kongsberg, two sonar manufacturers, and each of them contributed a multi-beam sonar to our survey last fall, and we were able to use those at no cost.” White said the companies also sent professionals and staff to assist on September’s expedition, at no cost to the university.

Wayne Lusardi, state of Michigan maritime archaeologist with the Department of Natural Resources, is also part of this week’s four-person crew. “I came up here and worked with Michigan Tech and a whole bunch of other partners last September,” Lusardi said, “and we used one of the Ocean Infinity autonomous service vessels to go out and collect acoustic, bathymetric, data with the hope of finding some clue of the disappearance of the aircraft that went missing with three crew members in October, ’68.”

To reach the search area, the crew is using a GLRS research vessel, the RV Solitaon. A multi-beam sonar device was used on the Soliton last fall, Lusardi said, and was used again Thursday. “We used a lot of that pretty state-or-the-art technology last year when we went out last year to acquire a lot of sound images of the lake bottom,” he said. “Then over the winter, we processed all of that data, prioritized it, looked through it over and over and over again, and came up with a handful of potential targets that we want to do further investigation on.”

Lusardi said a side scan sonar unit was used Wednesday, adding the device looks like a small torpedo tethered to the boat. “We pull that back and forth at a very deep depth, right over the lake floor, and we are able to see better quality data collection acoustically, of some of those primary targets, almost certainly a lot of them are probably rocks or geologic features, but there are a few which are of more interest,” he said. “They are more angular, they’re linear, they’re kinds of things that stand out from the lake bottom.”

Thursday’s technology also included a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). Lusardi said with the lights and cameras on the ROV, it will be possible to get to close to the objects of interest.

The search is being conducted in areas six to 12 miles offshore from Freda, in depths from 200 – 400 feet of water.

Lusardi said the search for the plane is actually two-fold: One, to finally locate the plane, but primarily to demonstrate that the equipment and the personnel at the GLRC can map the lake floor in great detail, and that can be part of the Lakebed 2030 Initiative, which is a bathymetric charting of the entirety of the Great Lakes at super high resolution over the next decade or so. “It was very easily demonstrated last year that we have the ability to do that hear,” Lusardi said.

White said this week’s goal is to use higher definition data collecting devices to re-examine anomalies located on the lake floor last September.

“We’re identifying and characterizing these anomalies that we saw from the wide area survey of last fall and now we’re using tools that are more of a fine-scale, high resolution approach to actually figure out what the little blips in the data are and the hopes are that one of these blips might turn out to be something to do with the aircraft.”