Experts believe they have discovered the wreckage of a private plane carrying five passengers that went missing on a snowy Vermont night 53 years ago.
On January 27, 1971, shortly after leaving the Burlington airport for Providence, Rhode Island, the corporate jet disappeared. Those on board were two crew members and three Cousin’s Properties employees from Atlanta, Georgia, who were working on a Burlington development project.
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Initial searches for the 10-seat Jet Commander yielded no wreckage, and the lake, which is 400 feet deep at its deepest point, froze over four days after the plane disappeared. When underwater searcher Garry Kozak and a team using a remotely operated vehicle discovered the wreckage of a jet with the same unique paint scheme in the lake last month, near where the radio control tower had last tracked the plane before it disappeared, they conducted at least 17 further searches. Sonar imaged the wreck 200 feet off Juniper Island. The island is slightly more than three miles southwest of Burlington.
“With all those pieces of evidence, we’re 99% absolutely sure,” Kozak said Monday.
The recovery of the wreckage on Lake Champlain, which lies between New York and Vermont, provides the victims’ families with “some closure and answers a lot of the questions they had,” he said.
Kozak told CBS station WCAX-TV that the lengthy search could be due to the disassembly of jets into several parts that are challenging to find.
“A jet literally resembles a pile of boulders.” So, most people looking at sonar data can ignore it because they’ll think, “Oh, that looks like geology,” Kozak told the station.
According to his website, Kozak started his career in submarine search and survey in 1972, and his company specializes in shipwreck and aircraft location. In 2012, Kozak was part of a crew that discovered a German submarine from World War II off the coast of Nantucket.
The discovery of the plane raises new questions and reopens old wounds, despite the family members’ gratitude and relief.
“To have this found now… it’s a peaceful feeling, but it’s also a very sad feeling,” Barbara Nikita, niece of pilot George Nikita, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “We understand what happened. We’ve seen a few photographs. I believe we are currently grappling with this issue.
His father, Frank Wilder, was a passenger on the flight.
“Spending 53 years not knowing if the plane was in the lake or maybe on a mountainside around there somewhere was distressing,” said Wilder, who lives outside of Philadelphia. “And again, I’m relieved that I know where the plane is now, but unfortunately, it’s opening other questions, and we have to work on those now.”
Kozak reported discovering plane debris on Shelburne Point when the ice receded in April 1971. An undersea search in May 1971 failed to locate the wreckage. According to Kozak, at least 17 previous searches have taken place, including in 2014. The Malaysia Airlines plane disappearance that year piqued authorities’ interest, but modern technology failed to locate the disaster.
Barbara Nikita, who resides in southern California, and her cousin Kristina Nikita Coffey, who lives in Tennessee, led recent searches and contacted other victims’ relatives.
What was fascinating about reconnecting with the group was that “everybody had pieces of the pie and the puzzle that when we started sharing information and documents, what we got was a much greater understanding and perspective of the information, how we were all impacted by this,” said Charles Williams, whose father, Robert Ransom Williams III, an employee of Cousin’s Properties, was on the plane.
According to Williams, the National Transportation Safety Board is conducting an investigation to determine whether it is the plane. Williams stated that the NTSB does not conduct salvage operations because they are prohibitively expensive.
“We’ll have to make a decision later, and it’s part of what we’re unpacking now,” he continued. “It’s hard when you start to think about that.”
The relatives of the victims intend to arrange a memorial now that they know where the plane is.
About ten months have passed since Lake Huron yielded the wreckage of a Tuskegee airman’s jet that crashed during a World War II training mission.
