Excavators Uncover Buried WWII Fighter Planes
 

Published January 06, 2013

Associated Press

• http://global.fncstatic.com/static/m...h_spitfire.jpg
  In this April 3, 1946 file photo, the Civic Hall in Rangoon, Burma, is seen with a crowd surrounding a British Spitfire, center, and an Auster aircraft (AP/British Official Photo)

LONDON – An airplane-obsessed farmer, a freelance archaeologist and a team of excavators are heading to the Burma city of Yangon on Saturday to find a nearly forgotten stash of British fighter planes thought to be carefully buried beneath the former capital's airfield.

The venture, backed with a million-dollar guarantee from a Belarusian videogame company, could uncover dozens of Spitfire aircraft locked underground by American engineers at the end of World War II.

"We could easily double the number of Spitfires that are still known to exist," said 63-year-old David Cundall, the farmer and private pilot who has spent nearly two decades pursuing the theory that a batch of the famous fighter planes was buried, in pristine condition, in wooden crates in a riverbed at the end of an airport runway.

"In the Spitfire world it will be similar to finding Tutankhamen's tomb," he told reporters Friday, ahead of his flight.

Not everyone is as convinced. Even at the conference, freelance archaeologist Andy Brockman acknowledged that it was "entirely possible" that all the team would find was a mass of corroded metal and rusty aircraft parts — if it found anything at all.

But Cundall said eyewitness testimony — from British and American veterans as well as elderly local residents of Burma — coupled with survey data, aerial pictures, and ground radar soundings left him in no doubt that the planes were down there. And others not involved in the trip have expressed cautious optimism.

"There is a high percentage chance that something is buried there," said Charles Heyman, who edits the reference book, "The Armed Forces of the United Kingdom." Heyman said it wasn't unusual for British forces to leave behind high-grade equipment in former war zones - even in recent conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Spitfire remains the U.K.'s most famous combat aircraft, its reputation cemented by the Battle of Britain, when the fast-moving, sleek-looking single-seater aircraft helped beat back waves of German bombers. Britain built a total of some 20,000 Spitfires, although the dawn of the jet age at the end of World War II meant that the propeller-driven planes quickly became obsolete.

Many were written off as the British war effort wound down, but why a batch of Spitfires would have been boxed and buried, as opposed to scrapped and dumped, remains the biggest question hanging over the project.

Cundall, who has long scoured crash sites to recover buried aircraft, said he first heard of the Burma theory from a fellow plane hunter Jim Pearce, who was at a party in Jacksonville, Florida, when two American veterans approached him with an unusual story. The men said they had worked as engineers in what was then known as Burma when they were tasked with carving out a large pit burial pit for the aircraft.

"It was the craziest thing you Brits asked us to do," Cundall quoted the men as saying. Cundall said he believed the story immediately.

Advertisements seeking more information were placed in magazines with names like FlyPast and Warbirds, and soon other witnesses came forward. One, a British veteran named Stanley Coomb, described driving along the air field's perimeter while engineers lowered huge wooden boxes — described as the size of double-decker buses — into a pit. Radar soundings appeared to show large, plane-sized objects lurking roughly 25 feet below the surface, Cundall said.

But finding the site was just half the battle. Cundall said it took 17 years of lobbying to get permission to dig in Burma, a task complicated by European sanctions against the country's authoritarian government, and, more recently, its tentative steps toward democracy. Cundall beat out other groups in an effort to win exclusive rights to the dig, finally signing an agreement in early October.

Along the way he found an unlikely ally, a Belarusian company called Wargaming.net best known for its multiplayer titles including "World of Warplanes" and "World of Tanks." The company's American director of special projects, Tracy Spaight, said he got his company involved after hearing about the Spitfires in the news, promising $500,000 toward the dig and up to another $500,000 if the Spitfires were found.

Company spokesman Frazer Nash batted away repeated questions about what the video game maker in the country known as Europe's last dictatorship hoped to get out of the deal, saying the company had an "open bucket" to dispense cash if the dig was a success.

"Money's not an issue," he told journalists. "Have you seen the profits for gaming?"

The reporters seemed mollified. "Can I have a job?" one asked.

The Spitfires — if any are ever found — would be divided between the Burma government, in line for about half the total, a local company, which would get another 20 percent, and Cundall, who would get roughly a third.

The Burma government might decide to sell its planes, Cundall said, although he promised that his share would be coming back to the U.K., "where they belong."

"It was a tool of war, but I want to make it a tool of friendship to bring Burma and Britain closer together." Also, he said, "I would love to fly one!"

After a last round of television interviews at the hotel Friday, Cundall slipped a jacket over his black Wargaming.net T-shirt and rubbed his hands together against the cold, casting his mind to his upcoming trip, and the moment of truth.

"Only a matter of time now before we start digging and find out: 'What's in the box?'" he said.

re: Excavators Uncover Buried WWII Fighter Planes
 

Thanks for posting this Freak, Im really interested in what they find, so if you read anything else on their progress please post it in here. Fascinating stuff!

re: Excavators Uncover Buried WWII Fighter Planes
 

Search for missing WWII Spitfire planes may have hit paydirt in Burma

Published January 10, 2013
FoxNews.com


A team searching for scores of lost Spitfire planes that were packed in crates and buried in Burma during the last days of World War II believes it may have hit paydirt.

David Cundall, whose 17-year quest to unearth the long-lost planes has cost him his life savings, told a news conference today that searchers have found a crate buried in muck in the northern Kachin state capital Myitkyina. Images transmitted by a camera lowered into the wet ground were inconclusive, but Cundall called the discovery "very encouraging."

"We've gone into a box, but we have hit this water problem. It's murky water and we can't really see very far," Cundall told reporters in Rangoon, Burma's main city. "It will take some time to pump the water out... but I do expect all aircraft to be in very good condition."

If the crate does indeed contain one of the historic aircraft, Cundall, an elderly British farmer who has been vying with potential rivals to find the planes and win from the secretive Burmese government the right to unearth them, will have been finally vindicated.

The search team is being helped by its local partner and Burmese scientists. One, geologist U Soe Thein, showed an image produced using a technique called differential magnetic technology which he said confirmed a Spitfire was inside the crate.

Cundall's team is confident they're digging in the right place because of information provided by 91-year-old war veteran Stanley Coombe, who witnessed American and British engineers bury the Spitfires, which were in their crates and greased and wrapped, on the orders of the British military. The location may be one of several where crates containing unassembled planes are buried.

"I never thought I would be allowed to come back and see where Spitfires have been buried," he said. "It's been a long time since anybody believed what I said until David Cundall came along."

Cundall says it was common practice at the end of the war to bury military machines such as planes, tanks and jeeps. “Basically nobody had got any orders to take these airplanes back to (the) UK. They were just surplus ... (and) one way of disposing them was to bury them,” Cundall said. “The war was over, everybody wanted to go home, nobody wanted anything, so you just buried it and went home. That was it.”

The Spitfire was also about to become obsolete with the Jet Age approaching, so it was likely the people involved also thought they had no real value. But now, only about 35 working Spitfires remain out of the 21,000 originally built.

Finding the Spitfires buried in what is now known as Myanmar has been no easy task. Dealing with the military-dominated government has been particularly difficult, because of its long-standing suspicions about foreigners and, in particular, its former colonial masters, Britain. It took the intervention of British Prime Minister David Cameron, on a visit last April aimed at improving relations between the West and the southeast Asian country, to finally get the digging approved.

The British Embassy in Yangon described Cameron's agreement with President Thein Sein to recover the missing aircraft as a chance to work with the new Burmese government "in uncovering, restoring, displaying these fighter planes."

Under the deal, Burma's government will get half of any number of planes recovered, one of which would be displayed at a museum. A company headed by Cundall will get 30 percent of the planes and its local partner 20 percent.

The interest in Spitfires, which helped win the Battle of Britain, has increased through the years because of the planes' history and scarcity and they remain in high demand for aircraft shows and military flyovers.
The reason the Burma search is so exciting to aviation and military enthusiasts is that a huge number of Spitfires could eventually be discovered.

The search team hopes to find about 18 planes in Myitkyina and nearly 40 buried at Yangon's international airport. They believe that more than 120 unused Spitfires could be buried in sites across the country, and hope to assemble and perhaps even fly one or more of them eventually.

Re: Excavators Uncover Buried WWII Fighter Planes
 

Thanks for the update Freak, and I hope Stanley Coombe is still alive and well when they find something, it was wonderful that he persevered with this until something was finally done to investigate if the planes are actually there.