But the U.S. Navy has long been ambivalent. Many times it has fought fiercely to control its underwater property, claiming that it is not subject to traditional admiralty law. In essence, that law says that if a salvor finds something on the high seas, he is entitled to one of two things. If the property has been abandoned, the salvor can keep it. If, on the other hand, the property still belongs to someone, the salvor must get "liberal compensation" from the owner for returning it. By claiming "sovereign immunity" from this salvage law, the Navy has staked out its own legal position: Without the Navy's permission, no one may salvage a piece of Naval property, even if the Navy has clearly abandoned it.
But ownership apparently does not confer responsibility. In 1944 and 1951, when it was sued in federal court by the owners of fishing vessels damaged by the sunken carrier USS Texas, the Navy claimed-successfully-that because it had long ago abandoned the carrier, it was not responsible for any damage it did.
To confuse matters further, on some occasions the Navy has readily ceded control of its underwater property. In 1978, salvor Gary Larkins (see "Gary and the Pirates," Feb./Mar. 1997) and his friend Dick Wauters were towing a side-scan sonar through Lake Washington, near Seattle, when they found, among other planes, two Goodyear-built FG-1D Corsairs. They made a videotape and took it to Captain Grover Walker, then director of the National Museum of Naval Aviation, and asked if he wanted them. "What the hell would I want a Corsair off the bottom of Lake Washington for? I have five in the museum," Larkins remembers Walker saying. "He was realistic about the whole thing and said as long as the planes went to an approved museum, then I could go recover them." Larkins pulled up one of the Corsairs, which today graces Seattle's Museum of Flight.
"If I had a plane that the Navy museum wanted, then Walker would make you a deal on it," says the salvor. But if the museum didn't need the plane, it had no objection to Larkins bringing it up for another museum to display. "The system worked and it worked well," he says.
The museum in Pensacola is the Navy's biggest recipient of historic aircraft. A gleaming monument to Naval aviation, it draws over a million visitors a year. Blue Angels A-4 Skyhawks* hang from a seven story steel and glass atrium, and the museums west wing houses a replica of the flight deck of the World War II-era USS Cabot, where Hellcats, Wildcats, Dauntlesses, Corsairs, and Avengers are all on display.
"The salvage of underwater aircraft has been unimaginably important" in developing such an impressive collection, says current museum director Robert Rasmussen. "I can point to at least 10 airplanes that are on display right now that have been salvaged, and the only reason we have any airplanes right now that actually took part in World War II is because they came out of Lake Michigan."
A quiet, soft-spoken former Blue Angel who paints aviation scenes in his spare time, Rasmussen took over the museum directorship from Walker in 1987. Soon after, he got wind of a recovery operation in Lake Michigan being run by Al Olson and Taras Lyssenko. In the 1980s the two buddies spent their spare time looking for treasure in Lake Michigan, where the Navy had conducted carrier training exercises during World War II. Part-time hobby though it was, they found the remains of some crashed or ditched airplanes, well preserved in the lake's frigid fresh water. When A&T Recovery, as Olson and Lyssenko called the salvage company they formed, brought up a Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber and a Grumman F4F Wildcat fighter for loan to the Patriots Point Air and Space Museum in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, word reached Rasmussen. "These were some of the most important planes to the history of Naval Aviation and I didn't have examples of either one," says the director. " I rescinded my predecessor's position and took an interest in underwater aircraft."
Salvaging airplanes, however, takes money-lots of it. Sometimes, as an alternative to cash, clients arrange to pay for salvaging services with an item the salvor wants: either part of the treasure being salvaged or something else, such as a piece of equipment the client deems obsolete or surplus. But U.S. law permitted the museum only the exchange of one item for another, not an item for a service. Rasmussen appealed to his Congressman, Earl Hutto, and in 1988 Congress passed a law that permitted the museum to exchange equipment for salvage services.
Initially the trading went well. In the first trade with the museum, which centered on a salvage job in Lake Michigan, A & T Recovery received title to two Wildcats (which the company quickly sold, unrestored, for $250,00 apiece) and a Dauntless, while the museum got a Vought SB2U Vindicator*, a Dauntless, and a Wildcat.
"Those guys at the museum became a bunch of horse traders," laughs Lyssenko.
"The trading program has been the lifeblood of this museum," Rasmussen acknowledges. "Without it, our collection wouldn't be half of what it is."
And then the trades began to go sour.
One of the first to go bad got started in 1991, after New York-based treasure hunter Robert Cervoni stumbled upon an airplane some 500 feet underwater off the coast of Miami. He sent the video footage to Roy Stafford, whose Black Shadow Aviation had restored many of the Pensacola museum's airplanes recovered for Lake Michigan. Bingo! thought Stafford the moment he saw the tape. "It was the Holy Grail of Naval aviation," he says, the only known Douglas TBD Devastator in the world. Not only that, but it appeared that the torpedo bomber may have been the sole survivor of the 1942 Battle of the Coral Sea, a vicious engagement in the Southwest Pacific in which Japan sunk three U.S. Navy ships, including the carrier Lexington. The plane was priceless, says Stafford. He set up a meeting between Cervoni and Rasmussen, during which Cervoni offered to sell the coordinates to the Navy for $25,000.
"I got pretty excited," admits Rasmussen, but he adds that the Navy could not respond immediately because it would have first to conduct "a thorough examination of the feasibility and cost of recovery and the viability of the aircraft for recovery.
After waiting several months for the Navy to respond, Cervoni sold the coordinates for $75,000 to Doug Champlin. Champlin then approached Rasmussen with a proposal. "I needed a Wildcat for my collection and the museum had a bunch of them from Lake Michigan," he says. "I said I'd deliver the TBD to the dock in exchange for one of the Wildcats. It was a win-win situation for both of us....That TBD was worth $2 Million at least and they had Wildcats sitting in the rain. It wouldn't have cost the taxpayers as cent."
Champlin says that Rasmussen and his deputy, Robert "Buddy" Macon, instructed him to file an admiralty lien on the wreck, which essentially would have prohibited anyone from taking it until the federal admiralty court formally awarded ownership. To place a lien, however, requires a piece of the wreck. Another $55,000 later and Champlin had the TBD's canopy.
Rasmussen recalls the situation differently. For one thing, he says Champlin initially asked for two Wildcats, not one. He denies telling Champlin to remove the canopy and bring it up, which would have risked damage to the aircraft. "I might have encouraged Doug to bring up a piece [of unattached metal], I can't remember, but that would have made sense and it wouldn't have been unusual," he says. "It's hard to get a real analysis of a plane's condition until you hold it in your hand." Finally, Rasmussen denies advising Champlin to file a lien. That, he says, would have been tantamount to ceding ownership of the TBD to Champlin.
Alarmed to learn that a lien was about to be filed, Navy personnel notified the Department of Justice. According to Champlin, "They [Justice] said if I didn't give the canopy to the museum to Rasmussen and the museum immediately, then we'll prosecute you for stealing government property. So I dropped the lien and shipped them the canopy."
Not long after that, another deal went bad. In 1993 Florida salvor Peter Theophanis went to Lake Michigan to look for a particularly sound Dauntless that the museum told him it was interested in. The salvor couldn't find that airplane but he did find its ugly-duckling sibling, a wreck that was little more than a Dauntless cockpit, wings, and landing gear. Significantly, the engine and the fuselage aft of the cockpit had been removed, indicating that the Navy had abandoned the airplane decades before. Theophanis filmed the Dauntless and sent the videotape to Pensacola.
