An Airplane that Was Missing for 53 Years Has Been Located With the Help of a Drone
© Garry Kozak
On a cold, snowy January evening in 1971, three associates from Cousins Properties, a real estate firm from Atlanta, GA, boarded a Jet Commander aircraft in Burlington, VT. The small private plane, with two pilots, was headed for an airport in Providence, RI. Shortly after the plane passed over Lake Champlain to turn around, the control tower lost contact with it. There were no emergency signals sent out, and the control tower assumed the worst had happened — that the plane had somehow crashed.
Within the next few hours, emergency planes flew over the last known coordinates of the Jet Commander to search for any signs of a crash. As the flyovers proved unsuccessful, authorities opted to use a submarine to search the depths of Lake Champlain the following day. However, as temperatures plummeted and the lake froze over, any recovery missions had to be placed on hold until spring. After 17 subsequent search missions over the years, the plane was never found. That is, until an expert in the offshore industry used the latest in drone technology to finally locate the plane 53 years after it vanished.
Garry Kozak began his career as an offshore diver in 1970, working to support oil drilling rigs, laying underwater pipes, and as a marine salvage operator. By 1972, Garry transitioned to undersea search and recovery, quickly becoming known as an expert in side-scan sonar technology. Garry soon started his own company, GK Consulting. His personal website states, “Garry created the very first formal training course on side scan sonar and has trained more people, navies, and commercial organizations on the use of this technology than any other person in the world. When present day sonar experts need advice on data interpretation or the technology, it is GK Consulting who they go to.”
Garry first heard of the missing plane in the 1980s, but it wasn’t until 2014 that he became involved with any search efforts after learning of another team using a drone to search the depths of Lake Champlain, to no avail. He contacted the team and asked to review the data they had collected. Though the drone-enabled sonar images the crew had taken did not reveal the missing plane, Garry did notice some anomalies.
It wasn’t until 2022 that Garry was able to lead a mission to conduct his own drone search. Using the location of the anomalies he had found within the other team’s drone imagery, Garry began searching the lake, which has a maximum depth of just over 400 ft. The search proved unsuccessful, but Garry was not ready to give up. In May of 2024, Garry and his team once again had the opportunity to search the lake.
Equipped with a side-scan sonar drone, Garry finally found the missing plane resting 200 ft below the surface of Lake Champlain. The scan revealed what appeared to be a large debris field in the shape of a plane. Garry explained that part of the reason it may have taken so long to locate and identify the wreckage is because of how it would have appeared in previous scans. “A jet looks like a pile of rocks, literally,” Garry said. “So, to most people looking at sonar data, they can overlook it because they’ll go, ‘Oh, that looks like geology.'”
But to the expert eye of Garry, he knew it was more than a pile of rocks. Since a side-scan sonar drone takes images of large swaths of the seafloor, the team needed up-close images to properly identify the plane. Sending another drone with a high-resolution camera to the lake floor, Garry was able to capture photographic and video evidence of the debris field. The drone’s camera revealed images of the plane’s fuselage with distinctive red and black painting, a broken wing, and the remains of two turbine jet engines.
The next step was for Garry to share the evidence and exact coordinates with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). It is now up to the NTSB to further examine and determine the fate of the wreckage. As for Garry, he said that “With all those pieces of evidence, we’re 99% absolutely sure,” that the images captured by his drone are indeed the missing plane from 1971. Garry hopes that this discovery will bring some closure to the families of the crash victims. Out of respect for the families, they are the only ones, other than the authorities, who will have the coordinates of what is now a grave site.
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