Mission recovers rest of Navy crew lost in ‘62

NORFOLK, Va. – Cold, windburned and on the alert for polar bears, a Navy team recovered the last remains of aviators lost on a remote glacier in Greenland when their plane crashed more than 40 years ago.

The plane, equipped to track Soviet submarines, went down Jan. 12, 1962, during the Cold War, while on a routine reconnaissance flight. The remains of seven of the 12 crew members were recovered more than four years later.

The Navy team that returned home early Wednesday after an 11-day expedition to the site did everything possible to find the rest, said the team leader, Capt. Tom Sparks.

“I’m reporting out that we’ve been 100 percent successful in that mission,” Sparks told reporters at Norfolk Naval Station.

“My hope is that our efforts and our mission success does bring some comfort and closure to the family and friends” of the crewmen, he added.

The team found human remains, personal effects and military artifacts. Sparks said he could not provide details. The identities of the crewmen first must be confirmed through DNA testing by military laboratories, a process expected to take at least four months.

In recent years, friends, relatives and fellow aviators pressed the government to bring back the last remains. The mission cost about $250,000.

“It’s a prayer that’s been answered,” said Bob Pettway, of McDonald, Tenn., who was in the same aircraft squadron as the crew and led a campaign to write letters to Congress to try to spur action.

“I’m just as happy as I can be that they recovered all of them,” Pettway said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

The wrecked aircraft, a P-2V Neptune aircraft out of the naval station in Keflavik, Iceland, went down during an 8 1/2 -hour flight, Sparks said.

The plane initially was thought to have gone down in the ocean, but in August 1966, British geologists found the wreckage while hiking on Greenland’s remote Kronborg Glacier when some of the snow cover had melted.

By the time a Navy team reached the site in September, it was again covered in snow. The remains of seven crew members were recovered, returned to the United States and buried with full military honors. The Navy thought all known remains had been recovered, Sparks said.

But one of the British explorers returned to the area in the summer of 1995, during an unusually warm spell that exposed much of the glacier, and saw human remains when he flew over the crash site.

Sparks said the weather deterred the Navy from making another search attempt until this summer, when conditions were again unusually warm.

Aided by ground-penetrating radar and dogs trained to sniff out remains, the 16 team members searched a two-mile by three-mile area. The team endured winds gusting up to 55 mph and temperatures that dropped into the teens at night.

“We had to really look out for each other,” Sparks said. “We had to worry about things like polar bears.”

The team held a memorial service at the site on Aug. 12.