In 1968, a National Center for Atmospheric Research aircraft went missing in Lake Superior. The only remains that ever resurfaced were a few bits of debris that washed up on the Keweenaw Peninsula. Both pilots and the graduate student aboard were never found, along with the aircraft.
A team with the Great Lakes Research Center out of Michigan Technological University began to search for the plane in September of 2024. Using leads from the verified debris and sightings, they searched 45 square miles of lakebed around the Misery Bay region in the Keweenaw Peninsula.
While the team was unable to find the plane during their searches, they were able to work towards something else: Mapping more of Lake Superior's bottomlands.
According to Travis White of the Great Lakes Research Center at MTU, only around 15% of the bottom of the Great Lakes is properly mapped. Of the approximately 100,000 square miles that make up the Great Lakes, just over 30% of it belongs to Superior.
"This is just something that realistically is going to take time and I'm pretty confident," White said. "That as more of this type of mapping is done here as well as across the Great Lakes we're going to be in a real kind of exciting age of discovery."
The search was conducted by using historical data from eyewitnesses and the debris that found its way onto the shores of the peninsula. From there, the team did sonar scans of the bottom of the lake. Any anomalies in the sand that were unidentifiable from the original scan were then marked, where they then went to go check the area again in larger detail.
"It's basically an underwater robot similar to a remote control car, and we dropped that down on these targets right close to the lake bottom," White explained. "We had a camera on a tethered cord all the way back up to the vessel. We were able to positively ID those as natural features, but none of them were anything that would have been man-made or from an aircraft."
Most scans on the Great Lakes in the past were on pre-digitized sonar scans, where the results would be etched out on paper. With modern technology, teams like the one at the Great Lakes Research Center are able to get a high-definition look at the bottom of the lakes.
One initiative is looking to have the Great Lakes completely mapped out by 2030, aptly named Lakebed 2030. A bill was sent to the U.S. House of Representatives this past April to help fund these efforts. If passed, the bill would help guarantee a complete in-depth scan of the bottom of the Great Lakes and release the information to the public.
"It's hard to even fathom what we might see down there, including some of the geological things that might tell us more about what happened 10,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago, to form the Great Lakes," White said.
The Research Center will now put the project into hiatus for 2026, as funding from the university has stopped. The team still believes the aircraft is out there, and hope that one day they will be able to receive the funding to help find it and help bring closure to the families of the victims.
