Missing Plane a Needle in 10,000 Haystacks

Sig Levanevsky’s final resting place remains a mystery.

While attempting a 1937 flight over the North Pole to Alaska, the Russian aviator crashed near Alaska’s north slope. During a recent search, historians and scientists failed to find the plane using a clue discovered during an oil drilling survey.

Sigismund Levanevsky was a pilot and adventurer known as “Russia’s Lindbergh.” On August 12, 1937, he flew a four-engine bomber from Moscow. His goal was to reach New York City; the flight was a test in which Levanevsky hoped to prove the viability of commercial flights over the pole. He and five crewmen were to stop in Fairbanks and Chicago along the way, but they never reached Fairbanks. Shortly after Levanevsky disappeared, pilots in small planes searched from the Brooks Range to the North Pole without seeing anything that resembled a downed plane. The pilots assumed Levanevsky’s aircraft crashed into the Arctic Ocean and sunk to the bottom.

In March 1999, Dennis Thurston of the Minerals Management Service in Anchorage noticed a saw a blob that looked like a 60-foot cigar while he studied a sonar image of the Beaufort Sea floor. Located between Kaktovik and Prudhoe Bay, the shape reminded him of a plane’s fuselage.

David Stone of the Geophysical Institute, who in 1990 looked for Levanevsky’s plane in a different area, searched Camden Bay with Thurston and others last August. The waters of the Beaufort Sea proved too rough and murky to allow them to see beneath the surface. In late May 2000, a group including Thurston, pilot Ron Sheardown and Geophysical Institute electronics shop supervisor Kevin Abnett returned to the site while the sea ice was still intact. The ice provided a platform above the mysterious object, which rests about 25 feet deep in Camden Bay.

On a sunny, windy day, they struggled to drill a hole through the sea ice, which was six feet thick. Through the hole, Abnett lowered an orange submarine with a camera mounted inside. Institute scientists have used the camera, steered from above like a remote-control car, for such tasks as checking the structure of sea ice and searching for a missing person underwater. The sub’s mission this time was to allow the searchers to see the object in Camden Bay before arctic rivers cloud the water with loads of silt.

While looking at the submarine’s television monitor, Abnett saw starfish, crabs, jellyfish and shrimp, but no airplane. A pile of rocks sat where the sonar suggested the plane might be. The original sonar readings taken during the oil survey may have picked up a ridge of underwater rock, Abnett said, but searchers also said they might have been looking at something different.

“We could have been about 200 feet away from the plane and not have seen it,” said Abnett.

When Levanevsky approached Alaska in 1937, radio operators on the ground last heard his voice when the plane was 300 miles past the North Pole. That means his plane could have crashed in an area of more than 170,000 square miles. For that reason, Abnett said the team would also probably not continue searching unless another specific clue pops up.

“You’re not looking for a needle in a haystack, you’re looking for a needle in 10,000 haystacks,” he said.