The UK-based team are now calling for specialist help so they can uncover what actually happened the day the plane came down.
‘We have a David and Goliath situation here and we will stop at nothing to figure this sad story out,’ the team wrote on their website.
Sergeant Paul Meyer stole the plane from RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk in an attempt to fly home to his wife in May 1969.
As the Hercules left the runway, one of the wing tips nearly touched the ground but Sgt Meyer recovered it sufficiently and it was last seen flying in a south-westerly direction.
It was reported at the time that the mechanic radioed his wife while in the air and spoke to her during the first few minutes of the flight.
‘Leave me alone for five minutes. I’ve got trouble,’ were reportedly the last words he spoke to his wife.
It is not known whether the plane was shot down or crashed due to the actions of the pilot.
A few days later wreckage from the plane, including a liferaft, washed up in Alderney. In July that year a corpse, which looked like it was in a flight suit, was seen floating near Jersey, but it was left to drift away.
Deeper Dorset – a small team of divers from southern England – set out to find the wreckage last spring, and they recently announced that they had located the plane.
‘We now have a real task ahead of us, but as usual we will come at it straight and level, whatever it takes,’ the team wrote on their website.
‘We will treat the aircraft remains as if it were a crime scene – the first job being to map out an image, not just the main site but the various pieces we can see on the sonar around the site. Already it is obvious we will learn a lot from what is still there after 50 years. However, the work is going to be painstaking as we reverse engineer the sequence of events,’ the company said.
‘We cannot do this alone. We require folks with specialist knowledge and we are working on that very hard right now. Having located the aircraft we can already dispel a lot of stupid rumours and conspiracy theories, which is certainly half the battle won.
‘It is, though, fairly obvious that many facts regarding that day have been withheld and it would be a really good idea if someone got the file out and started talking to us before we start to tell the story our way.’
The exact location of the wreck has not been revealed.
Grahame Knott, from Deeper Dorset, has posted on his personal social media page that some aviation enthusiasts doubted they had really found the plane. He said they were sure they had found the right aircraft, but they were not releasing any images yet. ‘The images are the only bargaining power we have when it comes to negotiating a deal with a filmmaker, which we are going to need to help fund the next stage,’ he wrote.
