An Aerial Graveyard: The Aircraft Beneath the Great Salt Lake
The Great Salt Lake is not the first place most people think of when they imagine an aviation graveyard. But the numbers are hard to argue with. Hill Air Force Base sits directly adjacent to the lake, and its primary flight corridor crosses the water. Commercial aircraft approaching Salt Lake International Airport trace similar paths. Over the course of nearly a century of flight operations, that proximity has produced a grim record: planes going down into the lake and not always coming back up.
The first documented aircraft crash into the Great Salt Lake occurred on October 6, 1935. A twin-engine plane went down, killing three people aboard. It took four months of searching before the wreck was finally located and salvaged — and that was considered a success. Not every subsequent crash ended with recovery. In August 1984, a light plane carrying two men disappeared into the lake and was never found. The lake claimed both the aircraft and, ultimately, any meaningful accounting of what it carried.
The scale of this problem becomes clearer when you consider the geographic reality. Hill Air Force Base is one of the largest military installations in the United States. Its flight operations have crisscrossed the Great Salt Lake for decades. Commercial traffic into Salt Lake International has done the same. Every one of those flight paths represents a corridor where, in the event of a mechanical failure, a crash, or an emergency, the lake sits waiting. The 1960 loss of a B-58 Hustler supersonic bomber — a crash that killed two of three crew members — was not an anomaly. It was one point in a long series of incidents.
What does a downed aircraft leave behind in a lake? The answer is not comfortable. Aviation fuel — particularly the kerosene-based jet fuels used in military and commercial aircraft — is acutely toxic to aquatic ecosystems. Hydraulic fluid. Engine oil. Battery acids. The various metals in airframes, landing gear, and engine components. All of these leach into the surrounding water as a submerged aircraft corrodes. In a lake like the Great Salt Lake — already stressed by declining water levels, concentrated pollutants, and disrupted hydrology — additional contamination sources compound an already serious ecological crisis.
A September 1993 helicopter crash claimed one life and added another wreck to the lake’s inventory. The 1992 Air Force crash near the Antelope Island causeway — discussed in depth in another post — killed twelve men and left debris in the water near the island’s shore. Each incident represents both a human tragedy and an environmental consequence that extends years or decades beyond the crash itself.
Recovery operations in the Great Salt Lake are genuinely difficult. The brine is corrosive, the bottom is unstable, visibility is poor, and the shallow areas that make up much of the lake’s total area create logistical challenges for anything larger than a dive team. But difficult is not the same as impossible. Technology has advanced. Recovery methods have improved. The will to do this work — that is the thing that has historically been in shortest supply.
At Fathom Restoration, we are working to change that. Our mission is to recover submerged vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and debris from Utah’s waterways. The Great Salt Lake is one of our primary areas of focus, precisely because its long record of aviation and maritime incidents has left behind a catalogue of submerged objects that have never been addressed. We believe that every downed aircraft still sitting on the lake floor is both an unresolved tragedy and an active pollution source that deserves our attention.
The lake does not have to keep its secrets forever.
Fathom Restoration is a Utah nonprofit dedicated to recovering submerged vehicles, vessels, and debris from Utah’s lakes and waterways. Donate / Volunteer / Report a vehicle at fathomrestoration.org.
Source: https://www.deseret.com/1994/6/12/19113845/lost-planes-and-mysterious-goo-inhabit-an-eerie-underwater-world/
