Wreckage of wartime bomber being recovered from lake in Eastern Finland

print this

Work is proceeding on schedule at the recovery site of the scattered remnants of a wartime Junkers Ju-88 bomber that crashed into a lake in the Northern Karelia municipality of Liperi in the Eastern Finland in the summer of 1944.
      On Monday, Finnish Defence Forces divers will commence their second working week in the area.
      So far only small shattered fragments of the plane have been recovered from Liperi’s Rauvanlahti.
      The bomber is believed to have disintegrated into tiny pieces after diving into the shallow waters near the shore at a speed of up to 600 kilometres per hour.
     
Sgt. Martti Mäkitalo of the Joensuu Police explains that the divers are working in practically zero-visibility conditions in the shallow water. “Vacuuming the lake bed causes the bottom clay to make the water very murky - it looks like milky coffee”, he says.
      “Gradually larger pieces of the plane’s fuselage and wings are being uncovered from the bottom. So far pieces the size of a man’s hand and smaller than that have been retrieved through the suction dredger’s hose”, Mäkitalo explains.
      The aircraft was on its way to the Karelian Isthmus with a bomb-load of around 2,000 kg.
      The Defence Forces archives do not contain any entries saying that the munitions would have been removed from the crash site during or after the war.
     
So far the divers have not observed signs of the plane’s presumably unexploded cargo.
      For safety reasons an area with a radius of 300 metres hads been cordoned off around the site.
      The recovery of the aircraft fragments and the possible destruction of any explosives in the bomb-bay will take at least a couple of weeks.
      If unexploded bombs are found, the Defence Forces will destroy them by blasting them underwater somewhere nearby.
      A Finnish Air Force crew of four was killed in the crash.


Links:
  Junker JU-88 (Wikipedia)

Helsingin Sanomat