A World War II fighter plane that spent almost 50 years nestled in a muddy ocean bottom off Martha's Vineyard, Mass., is now the subject of a dogfight between the Navy and a museum.
Raised from the depths Dec. 4, the barnacle-coated hulk of the F6F-5 Hellcat is being restored by volunteers who hope it can be added to the Quonset Air Museum's permanent collection.The Navy, however, says the museum deliberately broke the law when it plucked the plane from Nantucket Sound without Navy permission. And it wants the plane back.
The private museum's directors could face larceny charges or a civil suit if they don't surrender the plane, Navy historian William Dudley said Monday. That's what he told museum officials in a phone call Friday.
"They want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to break the law and not suffer any consequences," said Dudley, of the Naval History Center in Washington, D.C. The office grants permission to excavate and restore what the Navy calls "submerged cultural resources," such as sunken wooden ships, planes or submarines.
"They've set a terrible example of what we call wreck-stripping, or pillaging," Dudley said. "If people can think they can go out there and take any federal property they want, the nation's cultural heritage would be diminished in a hurry."
Neither the president of the Quonset Air Museum, Damon Ise, nor its lawyer, Raymond Gallison, would comment Monday on why the museum didn't seek Navy permission to raise the aircraft.
But museum officials, in a news conference, said they don't deserve to be punished for a rescue mission that has taken volunteers 750 hours so far to delicately scrape, wash and apply an anti-corrosive chemical to the plane pieces in the museum's hangar.
"It's a Rhode Island-based aircraft. There's no reason for this to be repaired by us and have it taken away from the people of Rhode Island. It's a horrible injustice to us," Ise said.
Ise said he hopes to negotiate the issue.
The fighter crashed in 1945 after the pilot, Ensign Vincent Frankwitz, reported engine trouble. The Hellcat - equipped with three machine guns on each wing - had been flying with six others stationed at the naval air stations in Charlestown and Westerly.
Frankwitz bailed out; his body was never found. And until June, neither the Navy nor wreck experts knew about the submerged plane.
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.