Group Looking For 60-Year-Old B-25 Bomber Asks To Dredge Mon River

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- Do the murky waters of the Monongahela River hide a mystery, submerged for 58 years?

In January 1956, a B-25 bomber, low on fuel, made an emergency landing in the Mon. Four crew members were saved. Two others drowned.

But where's the plane?

Steve Byers and the B-25 Recovery Group have made repeated attempts to retrieve the bomber from its watery grave.

The plane passed over what was then called the Homestead High Level Bridge. It floated down the river, finally passing under the Glenwood Bridge. What happened then?

"We believe that the current pushed the plane out toward the bank," Byers says. "And it came to rest in a hole that was identified right in the location where we're going to continue our search."

Now his group has applied to the Army Corps of Engineers for permission to dredge that portion of the river.

"Debris has filled in that hole over the years," he adds.

Is it covered with silt, or was it retrieved and carried off by barge, as others claim?

"In that era there were about three other planes that went down," Byers says. "There was a DC-3, a twin-engine plane that looked very similar to the B-25. And then it got cut apart and barged away, or trucked out of the city. So those are the mysteries that we're wading through."

He likens it to searches for sunken Spanish galleons, filled with gold.

"Sometimes those Spanish galleons aren't found for hundreds and hundreds of years," Byers says. "We're hoping to solve this in the same century."

RELATED LINKS:
Search Could Begin Again For Missing B-25 Bomber In Mon River (7/17/14)
More Reports by Dave Crawley

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