Navy to recover remains of aviators killed four decades ago

NORFOLK, Va. -- More than 40 years after a Navy plane hunting Russian submarines during the Cold War crashed on a glacier in Greenland, a Navy team is setting out to recover the last of the victims' remains.

The Jan. 12, 1962, crash killed all 12 aboard, but not all were recovered. On Monday, a Navy team will depart from Norfolk on a mission to bring the final remains home.

That gratifies Bob Pettway, a Navy veteran who has spent the last few years pressing the government to make this recovery effort. He led a national letter-writing campaign in which relatives, friends and shipmates of the men contacted Congress to try to spur action.

Pettway said he's "very hopeful" that all the remains will be returned.

"And of course I'm praying that it's a safe mission," Pettway, of McDonald, Tenn., said in a telephone interview. "There is some element of danger there."

The P-2V Neptune aircraft, equipped to track Soviet submarines, went down during a routine reconnaissance flight from the naval station in Keflavik, Iceland.

An eight-day search turned up no trace of the plane, but in August 1966 four British geologists hiking on Greenland's Kronborg Glacier discovered the wreckage scattered over a large area and remains of the crew.

By the time a Navy team reached the site, several feet of snow had fallen on the area. The remains of seven crew members were recovered, returned to the United States and buried with full military honors.

The Atlantic Fleet Naval Air Force safety officer, Capt. Tom Sparks, is leading a 16-member recovery team, accompanied by dogs trained to search for cadavers. They are expected to be on the glacier for about a week and return to the United States around Aug. 15.

Pettway thinks the Navy should have returned to the site long before now. But he's not bitter because he understands "there's always budgets, there's always priorities."

"I'm just glad they're going back and doing [this] right," said Pettway, 61. "I'm not going to ask the hard questions. There's no point in it."

A Navy spokesman said recovery of the remains is important to the Navy as well as to the families.

"In the Navy, we firmly believe that we will not leave anybody behind," said Mike Maus, with the U.S. Atlantic Fleet Naval Air Force, based in Norfolk.

Pettway, who was a radio operator in the Navy, learned of the 1966 discovery of the plane about four years ago.

Curious, he got in touch with one of the British explorers, who told Pettway he had returned to the area in the summer of 1995, when some of the snow covered had melted, and saw human remains when he flew over the crash site.

That's when Pettway began contacting relatives of the men and other members of the squadron to raise support for a new recovery effort.

Maus said poor weather had blocked consideration of other recovery attempts since 1995.

"So now, we've got another one of those time periods it appears that the weather is going to be good enough to get people in there," he said. "It's another warm spell."

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