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http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/878723.html
http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/878723.html
By LISA DEMER
ldemer@adn.com
(07/27/09 20:46:50)
If not for the adventurers who went looking for it, the old ghost plane would still be lost in the dark muck at the bottom of an isolated Alaska lake.
Nearly 16 years ago, a sightseeing pilot crashed his 1946 two-seater into the unnamed lake -- and lived.
But that's just the start of the tale.
This month a group of deep sea divers and pilots with a passion for finding lost wrecks descended on the lake to resurrect this one little plane.
It's not especially valuable or historic. No one was sure it would ever fly again. So why did 11 people, some of them not even Alaskans, spend time and muscle on a risky salvage operation?
"For the adventure. For the fun of it. For the challenge," said Steve Lloyd, an Anchorage diver who helped organize the expedition.
They wanted to prove they could. The pilots wanted to do it for one of their own.
"It was the curiosity and the drive to discover things that are gone," Lloyd said. "Lost airplanes or sunken shipwrecks."
ON A FRIGID SHORE
The crash still haunts the pilot.
Mike Legler was living in Eagle River back in September 1993. He went solo sightseeing almost weekly in his Taylorcraft floatplane. He restored it and loved to get out in the wilderness, hike, maybe fish a little. He was always back home to the family by 6 p.m.
He babied that plane, a fabric-skinned Taylorcraft BC12-D. In its day, it was a rival of the Piper Cub.
Legler took off that day from Fire Lake. A mechanic for Alaska Airlines at the time, he was a cautious pilot except on one point: He didn't tell anyone where he was going.
He later said he liked landing on the lake about 35 miles east of Seward because it was freshwater, easier on the plane, an easy walk to great beachcombing on Puget Bay off the Gulf of Alaska.
From inspecting the resurrected plane, pilot Kevin McGregor said it appears Legler caught the left float first during a glassy water landing. Legler was knocked out. He says he doesn't know what went wrong.
"When I came to, I couldn't see out of my right eye, so much blood had run into my eye from my head being cut open," he said.
In a flash, the water was up to his chest. He opened the cockpit door and, in his float vest, swam out under the wing. It was maybe one-quarter mile to shore in icy water.
The wind was blowing. He shook so hard he could barely stand. He had a few key items in his vest pockets, a lighter, a knife, flares. He built the only fire of his ordeal by igniting the cellophane wrapper on a package of cigars. He had no sleeping bag, no extra clothes.
He tried to walk out but ran up against sheer rock cliffs. He survived on mussels and kelp, berries and roots. An empty little cabin at the lake's edge gave him shelter.
Alone in the wilderness, he waited. For nine days.
The Civil Air Patrol and the Alaska Air National Guard flew more than 13,000 miles searching for him, but not in that spot. A charter pilot dropping off hunters in the area saw his flare.
"It was a crash that was never meant to be survived," Legler says. "And it's a swim that I couldn't make today if I had to."
THE IDEA
Lloyd, who along with his wife owns Title Wave Books in Anchorage, met Legler in 2001 when the two were being interviewed separately for a BBC television program, "Ray Mears' Extreme Survival."
Lloyd had just written a book about the Farallon, a ship that grounded on a reef outside Iliamna Bay in the winter of 1910. The 38 men aboard all suffered bitter cold, near starvation and exposure, but they survived.
Legler told Lloyd he had tried to locate his sunken plane in the lake but couldn't find it on the mucky bottom with the equipment he had.
As a diver, Lloyd has found big shipwrecks in Alaska, including the Torrent, a historic sailing vessel that struck a reef and sank near Port Graham in 1868, and the SS Aleutian, a steamship that went down in 1929 off Kodiak Island.
Maybe he could find Legler's lost plane.
Lloyd approached two acquaintances, commercial pilots Kevin McGregor, who flies for Delta, and Marc Millican of Northwest. They wanted in.
They were gaining fame for their own big find. In 1999, the two pilots had discovered the wreckage of fabled Northwest Airlines Flight 4422, the DC-4 that slammed into Mount Sanford on a winter night in 1948 during a blinding show of northern lights. All 30 men aboard died. The pilots found the remains of the propeller, part of the engine plate and human remains, eventually traced to a merchant marine on the flight.
The plane was rumored to be carrying gold bullion from China. McGregor says they never found the gold, but he believes it was there and someone else found it first, a long time ago.
IN THE MUCK
In the summer of 2007, Lloyd and the two pilot adventurers attempted to find Legler's Taylorcraft with a metal-detecting magnetometer. But the Taylorcraft was mainly wood, fabric and aluminum, which don't register.
So they brought a sonar machine when they returned last August in Millican's Cessna 185 to what they've come to call Legler Lake. The grainy outline of a plane was unmistakable on the electronic display. An eerie ghost plane.
They cruised the lake in a Zodiac inflatable raft. Lloyd suited up and dove to the bottom, nearly 100 feet down. He found the plane, then dove again with a video camera to record the tail number: N95608.
The lake bottom was deep in muck from decaying plant life, visibility 6 inches at best.
"It would go away completely as soon as you touched anything. It's like stirring a mud puddle or something," Lloyd said.
McGregor flew to Minnesota, where Legler now works as an airworthiness inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration, to discuss the find.
He asked Legler if he still wanted the plane.
No, Legler said. By then, he had flown to the little lake three times trying to find the remnants. The last time, he had picked some wildflowers from the shore and tossed them in the lake. "I said my good-byes to it," Legler said.
McGregor offered to buy the submerged wreck. Sure, Legler said. How about $1? McGregor gave him $500.
THE EXPEDITION
For the next 10 months, Lloyd, McGregor and Millican planned Operation Lost Floatplane of Legler Lake. It was complicated.
The lake is remote and separated from open water by a rough and rocky moraine. Maps and evidence at the site suggest the lake used to be a cove that fed into the sea. But something -- most likely the 1964 earthquake -- raised the land and cut it off, Lloyd said.
They would need a big group to carry tons of gear to the site, make the dive, lift the plane from the bottom, haul it over the rocky beach, get it on a boat to Seward, then drive it on a trailer back to Anchorage.
"It was almost like a military assault," McGregor said.
All for something that might crumble.
Lloyd put together a team of four divers, including one from New York and another from San Francisco; all had dived with him on Alaska shipwreck expeditions. There was a videographer and his assistant, who would collect images and provide muscle. And three pilots, McGregor, Millican and a backup, a friend of theirs from Madrid, Spain. This bunch, plus two boat captains, made up the core group.
Lloyd arranged for three boats -- a landing craft, a Boston Whaler owned by one of the divers, plus a big research vessel with a mechanical hoist.
The group also had a six-wheeler, Zodiac inflatable rafts, and two planes for aerial photos and to be on standby for any medical emergency.
They left Anchorage on July 9 for what became an eight-day adventure.
McGregor, who splits his time between Anchorage and Atlanta, put about $10,000 into the project. But most of the equipment and labor was donated.
To get the plane off the bottom of the lake, the divers had to attach lift bags, sort of heavy-duty balloons inflated underwater.
"The divers were working in complete darkness and literally by feel," Lloyd said. "Try tying your shoelaces with your eyes closed and holding your breath."
The plane was weighed down by years of smelly goop.
One of the divers, Ursa Lively, an Anchorage fire captain, went down with a scrub brush to sweep off as much mud and sediment as she could, all by feel.
Then the bags were inflated. Everyone was nervous. Would they lift the heavy load, or destroy the plane?
It floated to the surface very slowly -- but in one piece.
They got it to shore and lanced the wings to let out more mud and grit.
"It was just belching out of there," McGregor said.
The main wing supports, made of wood, were in beautiful shape, he said. Lively had brought a hose and pump and they used that to clean more muck from the wings and the fuselage.
The next day they used the six-wheeler to haul the trailered plane over the rocky beach. They floated it in the sea water for the short trip to the research vessel, the R/V Norseman, which had a device to hoist it aboard for the four-hour boat ride to Seward.
"So now the airplane was safe," McGregor said.
NOW WHAT
By July 17, the plane was on display at Lake Hood. The team gathered to dismantle it and strip away the fabric skin. "Like flesh," someone said. It needed to dry out as soon as possible.
McGregor called Legler about the successful recovery. "The first thing Mike asked was, "Was the propeller bent?"
It wasn't, but the nose was crumpled and there was a hole in the fuselage. And they saw where Legler's head had hit the instrument panel.
McGregor said they found a lot of Legler's stuff: his coat, his tackle box, a Thermos with coffee still in it. Plus other things, personal things that he plans to give to Legler.
The skeletal Taylorcraft is in Millican's garage in Anchorage. McGregor is looking into whether it makes sense to get it flying again. Mechanics have taken a look. He thinks it would take about a year to restore the plane, if it can be done.
He's thought so much over the years about Legler and all he went through. "This is part of exorcising his demons," McGregor said.
Legler bought and restored another old plane, an Aeronca 7AC Champ that he used to look for the Taylorcraft. He lives outside of Minneapolis now, in a house on a private airstrip. He still goes flightseeing, but in Minnesota "it's all green. It's all flat." Kinda boring after Alaska.
Lloyd took off on another diving adventure, this time at an abandoned copper mine.
Maybe, Lloyd said, it'll come full circle. Maybe one day, Legler will make one more jaunt in that old, treasured Taylorcraft. Maybe then, he can leave that bad day behind.
