Part of missing Navy jet located
F-9F Cougar fighter aircraft crashed in 1960 in Flathead Lake
Searchers found a small part of a long-missing U.S. Navy jet Tuesday at the bottom of Flathead Lake.
Underwater sonar located what appears to be an aileron - a flap on the main wing - at a depth of 270 feet, said John Gisselbrecht of Kalispell, one of the searchers.
The searchers plan to conduct extensive deepwater dives today in southern Flathead Lake at a spot roughly along a line between Blue Bay and Matterhorn Point.
They found the piece about two miles from where searchers in 1960 tried to find the F-9F Cougar jet fighter - piloted by reservist U.S. Marine Capt. John Eaheart - that crashed into the lake. Eaheart's body and the fuselage of the jet never were found.
Eaheart, a former University of Montana basketball player, was a Western Airlines pilot who was engaged to a flight attendant in the same company.
In 1960, he went to Alameda Naval Air Station in California for his two weeks of annual Marine reservist training. As part of the training, he flew his F-9F, an update of a Korean War fighter that saw some action early in the Vietnam conflict, to Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls.
At that time, his fiancee was at her parents' house in the Yellow Bay area.
One evening, Eaheart left Malmstrom and flew over the Yellow Bay house a couple of times at an altitude of about 2,000 feet. Then an apparent explosion occurred in the plane and it plunged into the lake, with a second explosive sound erupting when it hit the water. Gisselbrecht theorized that the second sound was Eaheart trying to eject from his cockpit.
Parts of the plane and Eaheart's helmet were recovered in 1960.
Gisselbrecht, who explores underwater plane wrecks as a hobby, has researched this accident for years. His search picked up in April when Sandy and Gene Ralston, underwater search and recovery specialists from Boise, Idaho, arrived at Whitefish Lake to successfully find a drowning victim there.
Gisselbrecht contacted them to see whether they would be willing to use their equipment, including sonar, to hunt for Eaheart's body and plane. They agreed. The search began last weekend.
The search team includes deepwater divers Stellzen Muller and Ken Clizbe of Missoula; Ruby, a cadaver search dog, and her handler, Deb Tirmenstein, of Frenchtown; and some Bigfork volunteer firefighters and their motorized rubber rafts. Some cadaver dogs can sniff gases coming from bodies in deep water, and Ruby helped the searchers check some locations, Gisselbrecht said.
If Eaheart's body and fuselage are found, the searchers will study the scene for clues to the crash. But they plan to leave both in place. Plans have been made to mark the site with a shoreline memorial.