This Diver Spotted The Outline Of A Plane In The Pacific – And Came Across A Truly Thrilling Sight

Brandi Mueller feels like she’s in another world. She’s 130 feet below the surface of the Pacific, and swimming through the crystal-clear waters is total paradise. Then a shadowy outline catches her eye in the depths below. So, she swims deeper – and finally sees it. There, at the bottom of the lagoon, is an airplane. And that’s not all that’s lurking beneath the waves...

The site of Mueller’s dive is pretty far-flung, too. You see, the plane can be found inside the Kwajalein Atoll, which is home to one of the world’s largest lagoons. And the atoll’s nearest neighbor, Honolulu, is around 2,100 miles away. That meant finding the plane was practically like grabbing the proverbial needle in a haystack.

It’s not like this was a regular thing for Mueller, either. Later, she admitted that diving is “pretty slow going most of the time.” But there’s an upside. “You have a lot of time to take in what’s around you and observe,” Mueller added. This is handy, as Mueller is also an avid photographer. She wants to “[share] the beauty of our planet, particularly the underwater realm.”

“The ocean is incredible. The more time you spend underwater, the more things you see,” Mueller said. And she’s certainly clocked up some hours in the ocean! An experienced diver, Mueller has been a boat captain and a dive instructor in such idyllic locations as Hawaii and Turks and Caicos.

Mueller told Adventure Sports Podcast, “I don’t really remember what it felt like to not dive.” Fast-forward to today, and she has explored the waters of more than 30 countries. Pretty impressive! But the plane may be the most surreal underwater sight she will ever come across.

The unusual wreck lies in the soft sand at the bottom of the lagoon. Even though it’s partially submerged, its outline is distinctly recognizable. And Mueller is excited to take in the bizarre sight. She swims towards the stricken craft, whose propeller has wedged itself into the lagoon floor.

“Diving on shipwrecks seems normal. You expect ships to have sunk,” Mueller later told the Daily Mail. But diving on airplanes was much more unusual. “Planes don't belong in the water. They belong in the sky,” she added. Well, she does have a point!

So, how did the plane end up at the bottom of the lagoon? Could it have crashed? Well, it appears to be undamaged. In fact, it is in near-perfect condition. That aluminum coating has hardly rusted at all.

And if you thought that coming across one underwater plane was extraordinary enough, the lagoon is actually home to over 150 of them! Across two square miles, there’s a so-called “airplane graveyard” here. “It’s incredible to be in this different world,” Mueller told Adventure Sports Podcast, adding, “I find them so fascinating!”

Mueller added that the scene looked as though “someone took toy airplanes and threw them in the sand.” But these planes are much bigger than toys, with some measuring up to 53 feet in length and boasting a wingspan of 67 feet. We’re not sure how easy these big boys would be to fling about!

Given their remote location, the airplanes are rarely seen. Mueller wasn’t sure if anyone had ever spotted all 150 of them. But visitors have to be quick. If you descend to the wrecks with scuba gear, you have only 20 minutes underwater before your air tank runs out.

“I always have this feeling of, ‘I need more time, swim faster, I want to see more!’” Mueller admitted to Adventure Sports Podcast. But one spot she frequently returned to with her scuba gear is referred to as “13 Planes.” Why? Well – you’ve guessed it – you can see 13 aircraft in a single dive.

Still, Mueller is glad that the planes are in the lagoon, as she is able to scuba dive to their depth of 130 feet. If they were on the other side of the island, it wouldn’t be so easy. The ocean gets very deep very quickly, meaning you’d need a submarine to see any planes there. But while these craft may look eerie, their new home has actually given them a fresh lease of life.

Mueller described the ocean as “someone else’s, or something else’s, world,” and ocean life has certainly embraced the planes. Basically, as the diver explained, the craft have become a sort of artificial reef. Coral flourishes on their shells, and fish, turtles, and even sharks come to pay them a visit.

Mueller described seeing tiny glassfish that “swarm so tightly they block the view of whatever is behind them. They just fill up the whole cockpits of these planes, and you can’t even see inside them.” Lionfish make use of the planes, too.

”They love areas where the propellers rest in the sand. Three or four can almost always be seen, sometimes resting right on the blades,” Mueller said of the lionfish. But what happens when they get a bit hungry? Well, they simply “move upward just a bit to partake in the cockpit buffet of glassfish.” Sounds like a wonderful day out to us!

And we don’t even need to go underwater to see these eerie planes in their new habitat. You see, Mueller hasn’t just explored the airplane graveyard for herself. She’s combined her love of diving with her passion for photography and has published images of the stunning relics.

The rare images allow everyone to visit the airplane graveyard. Mueller said, “They’re in such a remote location, and it’s so hard to get to that I want to show people.” The extraordinary pictures show the planes at the bottom of the lagoon. And in some shots, a black-and-white filter lends them an even more haunting air.

Mueller later said that the planes “should have flown more, lived longer.” She’s even described some of the aircraft as looking “like they could take off at any moment!” So how did they end up at the bottom of the Pacific? And how have they remained in relatively pristine condition?

Well, the lagoon is also an underwater World War II museum of sorts. And the airplanes in the graveyard didn’t crash – they were dumped. Mueller explained, “They weren’t shot down, they didn’t crash there. They were loaded up on a barge and thrown into the water.” That’s right. At the end of WWII, around 150 American airplanes were dropped into the lagoon.

In August 1945 the U.S. only had one goal remaining: to get the troops back safely. And while the planes had played an important part in winning the war, they were simply not as important as reuniting families. They were heavy and outdated, too, and were no longer needed.

The airplane graveyard boasts seven different types of airplanes flown by the Allies, and Mueller has photographed every kind! There are Douglas SBD Dauntlesses, PBJ-1 Mitchells, Grumman TBF Avengers, Grumman F4F Wildcats, and Curtiss C-46 Commandos as well as a Vought F4U Corsair and a Curtiss SB2C Helldiver. That’s quite the collection!

And Mueller found it fascinating to delve into the awesome history behind the planes. She said, “I love that we can go dive something that’s 75 years old that has this story behind it of a war.” For sure, the planes in the graveyard played an essential role in that fierce conflict.

All of the planes at the bottom of the lagoon had once flown in the Pacific War between the Allies and the Japanese Empire. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had destroyed America’s Pacific Fleet, and in the wake of that infamous assault the Japanese military began to take control of islands in the South Pacific. But over time, one by one these isles started to come back under American power as the U.S. Navy staged a comeback.

A total of nearly 50,000 U.S. troops participated in the battle to grab the Marshall Islands from Japan. This victory gave American forces a staging post from which it could strike at the Japanese mainland itself. And in August 1945 nuclear bombs were dropped onto Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rapidly heralding the end of the war.

Mueller said, “It’s so weird to see planes underwater and think they were flying 75 years ago!” She said she found it somehow more special that the planes didn’t crash into the lagoon. According to her, they looked as though they could return to the skies at any moment – ready for duty once again.

And the Douglas SBD Dauntless is the most common plane you’ll find in this part of the Pacific. Mueller said, “You can pretty much drop in anywhere in what we call the graveyard, and you’ll see random SBD planes scattered down in the sand.” This model was created from 1940 to 1944 and given the nickname of “Slowly but Deadly.” The SBD had a maximum speed of 255 mph, leaving it vulnerable to the rapid Japanese Mitsubishi A6M Zero, which could reach 350 mph.

Despite this, the SBD was popular. The aircraft was extremely agile, making it harder to shoot down. And 1942’s Battle of Midway was one of the biggest moments for the SBD, as pilots in the planes dealt lethal blows to a number of Japanese aircraft carriers. But it definitely wasn’t the only type of craft in the lagoon.

There were also 11 PBJ-1 Mitchells in the airplane graveyard. The Navy and the Army had about 800 spare PBJs, which were claimed by the Marines and adapted to fit their needs. The ‘1’ stands for the modifications made by the Marines to the standard aircraft.

Mueller said of the PBJ-1s, “They are so cool. They’re gigantic.” She’s right! These planes are each over 50 feet long and have a wingspan of almost 70 feet, which can make a diver feel very small. And according to the folks who flew them, they were particularly great at jungle and small island landings. One example has landed on the lagoon floor upside-down, exposing the bomb doors, and Mueller said this made it ideal for exploring.

There are also two Grumman TBF Avengers in the airplane graveyard, and their positions are mirrored opposites – one is upright and one is upside down. Measuring just over 40 feet long and with a 54-foot wingspan, this plane was one of WWII’s heaviest single-engine aircraft. Its gross weight is not far short of eight tons!

The Grumman TBF Avengers are also Mueller’s favorite planes to dive, according to video footage she uploaded to YouTube. Brought into service in 1942, they were the first craft to have stow-wing technology. This meant the wings could fold back onto the fuselage. Pretty neat!

Another graveyard dweller with an impressive record is the Vought F4U Corsair. It’s instantly recognizable from its wing, which is bent at the middle like a gull’s. This is an important feature, helping the plane reach speeds over 400 mph. That made it America’s fastest aircraft when it went into service. 

The Corsair was so successful that it was still flown after the war had ended. In fact, the United States used it all the way up to 1953! And according to Mueller, the lagoon version was also very popular among the lionfish population. She remembered, “There always tended to be a couple of lionfish down by the propeller on the nose of the airplane.”

The Grumman F4F Wildcat is another important airplane, and it was arguably America’s only truly successful fighter until the introduction of the Corsair in 1942. It helped that the Wildcat could achieve an impressive 320 mph, making it nearly as speedy as a Japanese Zero. And pilots said this small and mighty craft – measuring just 28 feet with a wingspan of 38 feet – was incredibly maneuverable. Even better, it could take a lot of flak while remaining airworthy.

But there’s only one Curtiss SB2C Helldiver in the graveyard. No surprise, really, as this type of plane wasn’t as popular among pilots as the Douglas SBD it was designed to replace. Despite being faster than the SBD, it apparently wasn’t as easy to fly, as its long nose got in the way when taking off and landing! All the same, the Helldiver had some success in the Marianas and in the Philippines as well as in the skies over Taiwan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

And speaking of Curtiss-made planes, only about 3,000 of the C-46 Commando were ever created. The aircraft evolved from the non-military airline DC-3s, so it naturally played a major role in transporting lots of cargo and passengers. The plane thrived when taking routes over wide sweeps of mountains and ocean. 

The Commando was particularly good at flying over the Himalayas – or “The Hump” as they were dubbed by pilots. It could survive rough landings and extreme weather, making it great in the Pacific theater. But, today, the passengers on board the lagoon aircraft are a little different, with sponges and fish enjoying the interior of the plane. And thanks to Mueller, you can see all these planes for yourself.

Yep, Mueller has compiled her photographs into a book called The Airplane Graveyard: The Forgotten WWII Warbirds of Kwajalein Atoll. And the stunning images are accompanied by accounts of the planes’ exploits compiled by military historian Alan Axelrod. His fascinating insight gives us more details of the roles these awesome machines played in WWII.

Mueller’s account is pretty amazing, and she clearly hankers to get back in the atoll's waters again. She admitted to Adventure Sports Podcast, "I start to get crabby if I haven’t been underwater in a certain amount of time.” We’re sure that we’ll hear about more of her adventures soon! Maybe they’ll even be as incredible as the airplane graveyard.

And we’re sure any diver would be astounded by one man’s tale of disaster aboard a Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird.” As the plane rocketed through the thin air at incredible speed, it suddenly started to fall to pieces. The aircraft was out of control, and pilot Bill Weaver had no idea what happened. Horrifically, he was unconscious and plummeting toward the ground.

Gradually, Weaver regains consciousness. “This has to be a bad dream,” he whimsically thinks. But 14 miles up and shooting towards Earth is not a great place for whimsy. He’s not going to wake up and figure out what’s going on. Because this hasn’t been a dream, as he slowly realizes.

The air is rushing by Weaver as he falls. But although he can hear the wind making pieces of his equipment flap, he can’t see anything. The glass window of his suit in front of his face is covered in ice, the freezing temperature of the thin air having left him effectively blind. There seems to be no way out for Weaver.

Weaver had not been afraid of danger; for his entire career as a test pilot, it had been a central part of his life. He’d been involved in testing super-fast planes for some time. The pilot had tested not only SR-71s, but also all the other planes that could top Mach 3 – that’s three times the speed of sound – including YF-12s and A-12s.

The plane that had fallen apart around Weaver was a Lockheed SR-71, known as a Blackbird. Operated by the United States Air Force (USAF) as a spy plane, it was still a young airplane at the time of the 1966 accident. Lockheed had developed the aircraft from its A-12 in its Skunk Works department.

When spying, the Blackbird flew high and fast. Very fast. It was and still is the most rapid piloted aircraft, a record it took from Lockheed’s YF-12 in 1976. The plane was quick enough to outpace a missile. This was the plan if the Soviets somehow managed to get a lock: simply outspeed their weapon.

Although the Blackbird was fitted with countermeasures to defeat enemy radar, it would hardly need them. It was made to be close to invisible to radar, and if the enemy did lock on, the pilot could maneuver to shake free. If that failed, the SR-71 would disappear out of range so fast that a missile couldn’t get close.

And forget about intercepting the Blackbird with a fighter jet. The Soviet Union’s quickest plane was the MiG-25, but it couldn’t fly at the heights at which the SR-71 cruised. So it’s no surprise that in 34 years, not a single Blackbird went down under enemy fire. Even so, of the 32 planes constructed, accidents claimed 12.

So the Blackbird – so named for its dark color, which was actually a near-black blue – was not always a safe ride for its occupants. They were two, sitting in cockpits one behind the other. At the front flew the pilot, while behind him you’d find the reconnaissance systems officer, who controlled equipment and navigated.

To keep the fliers alive at the elevations that the plane reached, they wore pressure suits. These were a type of life-support kit, which pumped in oxygen and, importantly, were pressurized. Without them, the fliers would be prone to a great deal of suffering, not just from the g-forces and rough ride, but also from the boiling of their blood in the low-pressure environment!

When a plane goes at Mach 3, it generates a lot of heat. And had the Blackbird been smooth, its skin would have been liable to cleaving apart and warping. So much of the plane’s aluminum skin was corrugated, which allowed it to grow when it warmed up, keeping it strong.

Heat wasn’t the only danger that threatened the Blackbird. The onboard computers struggled to keep up with the flood of data from the aircraft’s onboard sensors. Without getting too technical, at high speeds turbulence could then mean that a shockwave normally expelled backwards out of the plane’s engines could travel forward, instead emerging from the power unit’s inlet. The phenomenon, an “inlet unstart,” would cause the plane to swing from side to side, emitting bangs, until the internal systems got things back to normal.

The unstart could make the going a bit rough for the crew, with the wild movements throwing their heads against the cockpit. One way the crew might try to fix the unstart would be to stop both inlets and then start them up again. Lockheed learned from the problem, installing automatic reset systems – but not before Weaver’s accident.

Unstarts were common, so Weaver may well have expected one when he walked across the tarmac at Edwards Air Force Base in California. It was a winter’s day early in 1966, and he was accompanied in the Blackbird by Jim Zwayer. The crew of two would evaluate the plane’s navigation and reconnaissance systems together.

On top of this, the two of them would be looking into ways to enable better flight at very high speeds. To do this, the center of gravity of the plane was set back further than it normally would be. This could be expected to cut the stability of the Blackbird along its length.

It was about 11:20 a.m. when the crew received clearance for takeoff, and they powered away from Edwards. They refueled in midair, and turned east. Weaver took her up to 78,000 feet – not far short of 15 miles high. The plane flew at Mach 3.2, not far short of an astonishing 2,500mph.

As the plane cruised high above the Earth, the automatic controls of the inlet of the right engine stopped working, so Weaver switched to manual. The inlet had to be continually tweaked as the plane flew above the speed of sound, to manipulate the airflow into the engine. Do this wrongly, and problems would ensue.

The risk of an unstart reared its head. If the engine suffered an unstart, it would no longer be pushing the plane forward; as a result, with only one engine firing the plane would “yaw.” This means the remaining engine would power the plane in circles as well as forward, a catastrophe if it wasn’t set straight. Still, Weaver wasn’t too worried: other things being equal, the manually-adjusted inlet system should keep the shockwave in position.

Weaver made a planned turn to the right, banking the aircraft 35 degrees. Boom! The feared unstart immediately happened, the huge forces acting on the plane at such terrifying speeds violently increasing the right turn as well as pushing the nose skywards. Weaver slammed his stick down and to the left, but to no avail! The pilot realized that things were about to get hectic.

Ejecting from the plane at such high speeds would probably have been fatal, and Weaver tried to advise Zwayer to stick with it until he could slow down and get a bit lower. But with the g-forces mounting, the pilot could hardly get a word out straight. When people listened back to the cockpit voice recorder, they couldn’t understand a word that he said.

The truth was, though, that Weaver was not going to be able to get the plane down or even keep it one piece. It was careening out of control more than 17 miles up in the air. The planned maneuver had been the straw that broke the camel’s back, and now all heck was breaking loose in the aircraft.

It had only taken a couple of seconds from the problem in the inlet to spiraling out of control. And that spinning took its toll on Weaver, with the g-forces now so high that he could no longer stay conscious. As he lolled in his seat, completely out, the plane quite literally fell apart, and Weaver’s unconscious form started to head towards the ground.

Weaver wasn’t unconscious for too long, but when he came to, things were kind of weird. At first, he imagined that he was at home in bed, dreaming of all this. But as he gathered his senses, he started to realize that he was actually awake. The pilot was confused, though: there was no way he should still be alive.

So Weaver’s next conclusion was quite logical. If he couldn’t be alive, he must have died. And as it happened, he felt okay. If this was the afterlife, it wasn’t so – but, wait a minute! This wasn’t heaven. He had somehow been ejected from the plane and was plummeting towards the ground at a scary rate.

Now Weaver knew this was true because he could hear the air rushing past him and the distant noise of straps being flapped by the wind. But with ice covering the front of his helmet, he was effectively blind. So all in all, his position seemed difficult. He was still many miles from Earth, couldn’t see and had no idea how he’d got out of his plane.

The good news was that his pressure suit had kept him alive. Its emergency oxygen had ensured that inside it, the pressure stayed high. As we noted earlier, this kept his blood from boiling. And the inflated suit had protected him from being tossed around like a rag doll in the g-forces to which he’d been subjected.

The bad news was that when Weaver’s plane had disintegrated, it had been spinning and tumbling. And the air up here was just too thin to stop him if he was rotating. His ejection seat had a small parachute designed to stop a pilot from spinning, but as he hadn’t ejected in the approved way, it might not have worked.

Well, more good news. Sort of. Weaver was falling straight down, so the stabilizing chute must have worked. Now his next problem was that he had no idea how far from the ground he was, or how long he’d been out. His main chute was supposed to open at 15,000 feet, but in his position you wouldn’t want to rely on it.

So Weaver decided to activate it manually. Now his chief difficulty was that with frozen hands, he couldn’t actually find the D-ring that would deploy the chute – he’d have to open his helmet up. Just as he grabbed his face plate, he felt himself slow rapidly. His chute had deployed. And with his helmet open, he could see his navigator’s chute in the distance.

What was left of Weaver’s plane had beaten him to the ground and lay in flames several miles away. But his new concern was that, should he survive the landing, he’d be coming down in empty, snowy ground that seemed to be miles from any human life. A tough night beckoned.

Mind you, Weaver told himself that he was still strapped into his seat, so he would have some equipment, with a kit in its assembly. And he’d trained in survival, so things could be worse. With only a few hundred feet to go, he released himself from the seat. A lanyard would keep it attached to him, but not too close so that it wouldn’t injure him on landing.

As the pilot neared the ground, Weaver spotted yet another pitfall. Right where he was about to land was some kind of wild animal – perhaps an antelope. But it soon ran when he neared the earth. He came down into softish ground, not too much the worse for wear, albeit caught up in a fight with a wayward chute.

Amazingly, there was a person there to help him with the chute. A man in a cowboy hat came into view, having disembarked from a helicopter. So he wouldn’t be sleeping in the open after all! His amazing trip to the ground would now see him rise once more, this time in a chopper.

The man, Albert Mitchell, Jr., owned a ranch nearby – it turned out that Weaver had landed in northeast New Mexico, not far from the rancher’s house. Mitchell helped him with the canopy and trapped it under some rocks so that Weaver wasn’t dragged off into the sunset. Mitchell had alerted the authorities, having seen the chutes coming down.

Once Weaver was out of the chute’s harness, he found out what he’d heard flapping in the wind. It was the remains of his seatbelts. He definitely hadn’t ejected from the airplane: he’d left the seat behind! All that was left was the shredded remains of the belts that had attached him to it.

On top of that, there was only one oxygen line still attached – just – to Weaver’s pressure suit. The other was loose. If both had gone, he’d have been finished, without air and with a depressurized flying suit. And the kit had been a lifesaver: he had no more than a few bruises. Sadly, the same couldn’t be said for his colleague: Zwayer had lost his life when the aircraft fell apart.

It turned out that the Blackbird’s nose had snapped off behind the back cockpit. This had left the plane vulnerable to enormous g-forces which had pulled Weaver and Zwayer out of the aircraft. After the accident, putting the center of gravity behind its normal spot was discontinued, and work was done on the inlet system.

As for Weaver, his fall to Earth had not dampened his enthusiasm for flying Blackbirds. He went up again a fortnight later. Naturally, his accompanying crewman was a little nervous about how he’d feel. So when he took off, he heard a worried voice come over the comms. The engineer in the rear cockpit thought he might have bailed out on takeoff.

It turned out that the guy in the back seat couldn’t actually see into the front cockpit. And when he’d gotten a red light on his warning board that said that the pilot had ejected, he feared the worst. Luckily though, Weaver had remained aboard. The cause was just a switch that had mistakenly flipped.

So Weaver’s career as a test pilot did not end just because his plane vanished from around him. No, it continued in the same way. He got put onto the L-1011 airliner project after he’d finished with Blackbirds. Later he got promoted to chief pilot and managed Lockheed’s commercial flying operations. All in all, a better future than he might have hoped for when hurtling towards the Earth in free fall on that January day.