San Diego — home to fantastic beaches, the famous Gaslamp Quarter, and soon perhaps aircraft wreck diving. If you’ve ever dreamed of finding a landmark wreck on one of your scuba trips, but thought that sort of thing only happened in fiction, here’s some proof that your dreams are not without basis in reality.
Two scuba divers, Dennis Burns and Dr. Ruth Yu, recently made a discovery that drew headlines and sparked interest both in the local community and among divers worldwide: a 60-year-old, heretofore unknown airplane wreck.
The wreck was located only a short distance off San Diego’s Mission Beach in water only 60 feet deep, which makes it a supremely dive-able site, as it’s within most organizations’ entry-level certification depths. That the wreck has been sitting undiscovered for more than six decades is testament to the fact that once something is lost to the ocean, it can easily become lost forever.
The wreck, a Douglas A-1 Skyraider, was one of the workhorses of the U.S. armed forces in the later half of the 20th century. The Skyraider was an attack aircraft, piloted by a single pilot, and quite heavily armed. The model found off the coast of San Diego was known as an AD-4L, a plane specifically designed for winter warfare during the Korean War. It sported improved landing gear and compass, as well as four 20-mm canons, two on each wing, which have been positively identified on the wreck. There were only 63 versions of the AD-4L created. The Skyraider saw action in numerous conflicts, including the Vietnam and Korean wars, before being decommissioned in 1980.
The Skyraider off San Diego has been identified as a plane that crash-landed in 1963, meaning it has been sitting on the bottom of the ocean for more than 50 years. The original pilot survived the crash, even returning to duty the same day.
Its discoverers have now marked the wreck, but hopeful divers who may be lusting to dive here will have to be patient a little while longer while Burns and Yu collaborate with the San Diego Aerospace Museum to find a way of both securing the wreck for posterity and making it available for divers. The family of the original pilot has even expressed an interest in diving the wreck, but until a way has been found to protect the site from intentional or unintentional damage, its precise location is being kept a secret.
