History & Records

World War II Plane Recovered From Black Sea After Crashing 77 Years Ago (Photos)

Published

4 years ago

September 28, 2020

The remains of a Second World War-era Bell P-39 Airacobra fighter aircraft have been pulled from the Black Sea.

The plane was hauled from the water in the Kalamita Bay, near the village of Novofyodorovka, Crimea, as part of a joint expedition of the Russian Geographical Society and the Russian Defence Ministry.

The aircraft had entered service with the Black Sea Fleet in 1943 but was forced to make a water landing just one year later due to a technical malfunction during a training flight

The plane was discovered by amateur scuba diver Alexey Kazarinov in 2017 at a depth of six metres below the water surface and 800 meters from the coastline.

He told authorities the approximate coordinates of the accidental find but they could not locate the crash site for almost a year.

An official study of the fighter was eventually carried out in 2019 by an expedition of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation to search for sunken objects relating to the Great Patriotic War and retrieval of the plane began earlier this month.