n a bright morning in mid-March, Pat Scannon stands on the deck of a 40-foot catamaran looking for an airplane hidden in the waters of Palauâ??s western lagoon. A limestone ridge thick with vegetation juts into the cloudless blue sky behind him. His quick-dry clothing, coupled with a red bandanna knotted around his neck, befits Scannonâ??s role as an amateur archaeologist. He has spent the past 20 years making annual wreck-hunting trips to Palau, about 500 miles from the Philippines, to find aircraft that had been shot down during one of World War IIâ??s fiercest battlesâ??planes that may still be holding their pilots. His organization, BentProp Project, works to repatriate their remains to the U.S. To guide the search, Scannon ordinarily relies on interviews with Palauan elders, military records, and maps hand-drawn after the war. But on this trip, he has a new tool at his disposal.
Two technicians in a nearby Boston Whaler cradle a small, torpedo-shaped craft, then lower it into the water. Scannon watches as its nose tilts down and its rear propeller pushes it beneath the surface. Out of sight, the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), an oceanographic workhorse called a Remus, begins gliding through the lagoon in a pattern that resembles the long, linear passes of a mowed lawn. From roughly 10 feet above the seafloor, its side-scan sonar sends out acoustic waves that build a two-dimensional map. The strength of the reflected waves also helps distinguish metal from mud or coral.
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