Warbird Information Exchange

Has it ever been located on the ocean floor?

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Ain't no sunshine when she's gone!

No .. not yet.

A co-worker used to go on and on about how planes couldn't go missing and how the bermuda triangle was some kind of conspiracy and such.
I got tired of it and told him to look up the current location of this carrier. He came back, amazed that something that big could still be unlocated. I said if an aircraft carrier can't be found after it went down in a known location, airplanes and small vessels could easily vanish without a trace as well.
He never talked about it again.

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Life member, 91st BG Memorial Association
Owner, 1944 Willys MB #366014
Former REMF (US Army, O3)

And the particularly odd part to me is that the Coral Sea isn't that deep, relatively speaking. So where the heck did it go? And for that matter, have we ever located the Wasp and Hornet? (I believe the answer is no to both, just curious)

The Lex would be a good one to find, indeed.

Lynn

You're correct .. all of them would be good to find, but none of the three have yet been located.

Has anybody looked for them?

Not that I've ever heard of it. The Coral Sea/Solomon Islands area may be relatively shallow, but it is still remote and expensive to search.

Perhaps the right assets will be deployed to the Western Pacific in the near future. Or maybe Paul Allen will take an interest in finding lost aircraft carriers ...

I think that's the key here. It's not that these ships are "missing", it's that no one has put in the enormous effort to find their exact location. These ships sank (in the heat of battle) before the days of satellites/GPS and precise locating devises that we have today. There are many ships that sank at location "X" on the map and are actually resting miles away. I doubt when they when down, anyone thought about trying to mark their exact/precise location for future exploration...

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"Everyone wants to live here (New Jersey), evidenced by the fact that it has the highest population per capita in the U.S..."

I don't know if it's a good idea to look for them, anyway. They're all classified as War Graves, I think, so they couldn't be dived, right?

No telling how the next generation or the ones after that will treat "our" rules. Maybe they would start cutting off souvenirs if the locations were known. The CSS Hunley was a War Grave but they fished it out. They did it respectfully, certainly, but they still disturbed it.

Ballard wasn't able to prevent anyone from salvaging bits and pieces of the Titanic for auction. Not trying to write a sermon, here.