Lack of water bringing lakeborne B-29 to the surface
With Nevada (and much of the rest of the Midwest) suffering from a historic drought, a B-29 lost in the extreme depths of Lake Meade is now closer than ever to the surface.
“On June 21, 1948, the B-29 took off and headed east toward Las Vegas. Its five-man crew prepared a highly-classified device mounted in a clear dorsal dome atop the bomber’s fuselage.
The device, known as a “sun-tracker,” was a new kind of missile guidance system. There’s little publicly known about it, but a 1954 patent application suggests the sun tracker allowed a missile to get its elevation and orientation from sighting the sun. The device came from the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.
Testing the sun tracker required the B-29’s crew to fly a risky course — repeatedly ascending to 35,000 feet before plunging to 100 feet above Lake Mead’s surface.”
Well the thing hit and sank in over 300-feet of water. This largely put it off limits to most recreational divers, but now with the drought its in less than a third that...the rest here