Fifty-three years after a private jet carrying five men disappeared on a snowy Vermont night, experts believe they have found wreckage of the long-lost jet in Lake Champlain.
The corporate jet disappeared shortly after taking off from Burlington Airport bound for Providence, Rhode Island on January 27, 1971. On board were two crew members and three employees of Cousins Properties, a Georgia development company working on a development project in Burlington.
An initial search for the 10-seater Jet Commander turned up no wreckage, and the lake froze over four days after the plane went missing.
At least 17 searches were conducted, and last month underwater searcher Gary Kozak and a team using a remotely operated vehicle found the wreckage of the jet, which had the same custom paint job, in a lake near where the radio control tower had last tracked it before it disappeared. Sonar images were taken of the wreckage, which was found 200 feet below sea level near Juniper Island.
“From all this evidence, we’re 99 percent sure,” Kozak said Monday.
The discovery of the wreckage has given the victims’ families “some closure and answers to a lot of questions they had,” he said.
While family members are grateful and relieved that the plane has been found, the discovery also brings further questions and old wounds to light.
“It’s a relief to have this found now, but it’s also very sad,” Barbara Nikita, niece of pilot George Nikita, said in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday. “We know what happened. We’ve seen some of the pictures. I think we’re all struggling with it right now.”
Frank Wilder’s father was also Frank Wilder, and was a passenger on that plane.
“It’s been tough going 53 years without knowing if the plane was in a lake or on a mountainside somewhere,” said Wilder, who lives in suburban Philadelphia. “And it’s also a relief to know where it is now, but unfortunately it also raises other questions that we now have to answer.”
Kozak said the wreckage of the plane was found off Cape Shelburne when the ice melted in the spring of 1971. An underwater search in May 1971 did not find the wreckage.
At least 17 searches have been conducted, including in 2014, when authorities, piqued by curiosity following the disappearance of a Malaysian Airlines jet that year, hoped new technology would find the wreckage, but never did, Kozak said.
Barbara Nikitas of Southern California and her cousin, Christina Nikita Coffey of Tennessee, who is George Nikita’s daughter, have led recent search efforts and contacted relatives of the other victims.
What was interesting about reuniting with the group was that “everyone had a piece of the pie and the puzzle, and as we started to share information and documents, we gained a much deeper understanding and perspective on the information and how we were all affected by this,” said Charles Williams, whose father, Robert Ransom Williams III, an employee of Cousins Properties, was on the plane.
He called Kozak a hero for his efforts in finding the plane.
After the 2014 search ended unsuccessfully, Kozak became intrigued and looked into sonar surveys of the lake conducted by the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum and Middlebury College. He found four anomalies on the lake floor. Then in 2022, his colleague Hans Haag of Sonar Search and Recovery in Exeter, New Hampshire, and a friend with an ROV approached him about searching for the plane, Kozak said.
The team found a plane, which turned out to be a military aircraft. Last winter, Kozak conducted another sonar survey and found another anomaly. The team determined last month that it was likely the remains of a plane.
Williams said the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating to see if it is the crashed plane. The board will not attempt a costly salvage operation, he said.
“Whether there are tangible remains — whether there are enough, I hate to say it, to cause any alarm — that’s something we’ll have to judge later, but that’s part of what we’re trying to figure out,” he said. “When you start thinking about it, it’s difficult.”
Families of the victims plan to hold a memorial service now that the plane’s location has been determined.
