Peter Hunt peered into the dark, murky depths of Rosario Strait.
It was August and the air was hot and still, the water a flat gray sheet.
His bones ached from hunching over a six-inch sonar screen on the dash of his powerboat, Sea Hunt. For hours, he’d slowly steered Sea Hunt over a search grid, eyes flicking up for only a few seconds at a time, lest he miss it.
He was on the hunt for his own white whale, an A-6E Intruder that crashed just after take-off from Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in 1989.
The Navy gave up efforts to salvage the jet after spending three months searching with state-of-the-art technology. A report filed by investigators concluded any further efforts to find the jet were “futile and cost prohibitive.”
Hunt wouldn’t let it go. He’d flown the very jet sitting somewhere at the bottom of Puget Sound. The aircrew were from his squadron. From a ready room on base, he’d heard the harrowing moments before the crash.
A quarter-century later, he had to find it. This was his last shot.
That day, the sonar showed him the outline of something that caught his eye.
He whispered an expletive.
What were the chances?
Heart for adventure
Peter Hunt was born on Long Island in 1962 with a heart for adventure. In middle school, his parents moved the family to Athens, Greece. The family didn’t have TV. He devoured Alistair MacLean novels, snorkeled and spearfished. He swam far out to sea. He climbed down the cliffs to the Temple of Poseidon, god of the sea, located on a craggy spur.
His parents worried.
As a young man, Hunt pursued his love of diving and crewed on five expeditions to the Andrea Doria, an Italian ocean liner that sank off the coast of Nantucket in 1956. The wreckage site is considered the Mount Everest of diving.
Hunt opted to join the Navy, wanting to not just fly but fly in the most challenging conditions — from the deck of an aircraft carrier. Hunt earned his wings and as a young officer was stationed at Whidbey Island attached to VA-145, an attack squadron.
As a pilot, Hunt learned that to fly a jet, he must believe the worst wouldn’t happen to him. Otherwise, how could he handle the pressure, the danger of landing an aircraft on a rollicking aircraft carrier in the inky night or flying into combat.
On Nov. 6, 1989, Hunt witnessed the worst almost happen to two men in his squadron.
Things went wrong
It was a Monday around lunchtime. The sky was overcast and drizzly. Cmdr. Denby Starling, 36, and bombardier-navigator Lt. Chris Eagle, 26, blasted off the runway at Ault Field on Whidbey Island. They were on a routine training flight with another Intruder that should have taken them over the mountains. Four minutes after takeoff, things started to go wrong.
Both men felt a thump. Starling watched the tiny needles of two hydraulic gauges swing downward to zero.
It wasn’t big trouble. This happened to Starling four other times — two over land and two at sea — and he landed safely. He contacted the control tower and began readying the plane for landing. He swung the jet west toward Smith Island, dumped fuel and lowered the flaps to slow the jet down. Then he tried to lower the landing gear. That’s when the plane’s other auxiliary system began to fail.
He lowered the gear handle, rotated, pulled and held it out. He felt a thump and saw all gear indicators go barberpole — the landing gear was stuck. He held the handle and waited. Nothing. His wingman in the other Intruder flew by and took a peek. He could see the nose gear on Starling’s jet was trailing, the main gear doors were closed and landing gear were in the well.
Starling turned the jet gently west, intending to pass between the San Juans and Smith Island. As the Intruder rolled out of the turn, the controls stiffened under his hand. Ominously, he could hear a telltale whine, the sound of the hydraulic pump self-destructing.
“We are losing the combined, get ready to get out of here,” he said to Eagle.
The plane began to roll to the right. “Go ahead and get out now!”
Eagle didn’t need to be told twice. He grabbed the ejection handle, leaned back in the seat and yanked. Starling followed a few seconds later.
Eagle felt the kick of the explosive charge under his seat as it blasted him through the canopy 200 feet farther in the air. His head tossed from side-to-side and for a moment everything went black. Still in his seat, he looked over and saw the pilot floating through space. The world seemed to tumble as his seat fell away.
He shook the stars from his eyes. The water boiled and churned below.
Nearby, Starling looked up to a beautiful sight, his parachute blooming above him.
The men floated down to the frigid waters below. A Navy search and rescue helicopter launched.
Within 15 minutes, an air crewman was leaping into the water to help buckle the men into hoist seats, lifting them to safety. They were cut and bruised and Starling was hypothermic — but alive.
Later, Starling tracked down the sailor in San Diego who packed his parachute, and thanked him.
The Navy spent more than three months searching nearly 30 square nautical miles for the lost Intruder, hoping to salvage it and find out what caused both hydraulic systems to fail. The jet remained lost.
Today Starling is a retired vice admiral. When he learned his old buddy Peter Hunt was searching for the plane, he was pleased, but also bemused.
“I wondered why he thinks he can find it when the Navy can’t,” he said.
‘Why are you shaking?’
Peter Hunt remembers the moment when he first realized something was wrong.
It was 2005. Hunt had left the Navy and was working as a pilot for United Airlines.
He had just finished flight operations and was chatting with the chief pilot when his hand began to shake uncontrollably. He shoved the hand in his pocket.
The next trip out, he was greeting passengers as they boarded. The coffee cup in his hand began to shake. “Why are you shaking?” a boy asked.
The diagnosis immediately grounded Hunt for life: Parkinson’s Disease. Then, he didn’t know what that meant, other than some vague thoughts about Michael J. Fox.
Parkinson’s disease is a progressive disorder of the nervous system that affects movement and can be debilitating.
There is no cure.
By 2014 the disease was ravaging his body. He took 25 pills a day. He couldn’t sleep more than 45 minutes at a time. During the worst of it, Hunt decided to find the Intruder. He needed a win to prove to himself life mattered.
He started investigating the crash. Nearly forgotten in a desk drawer in his Dugualla Bay home were two documents: a salvage report and a firsthand account from bombardier-navigator Chris Eagle. He contacted the crew of both planes in the air that day and grilled them for details.
Two friends bought him an $800 Dragonfly, a relatively inexpensive sonar scanner to mount on his boat. Unlike professional models that can scan to the side, this recreational depth sounder only scanned the seabed directly below.
That spring he made three dives and found nothing but rocks.
A friend reminded him of another document that might help, a Judge Advocate General’s report. It’s there he struck pay dirt. Scouring the more than 200-page document, he realized investigators had calculated the position of Starling’s jet using his wingman’s transponder data. All along, they’d been looking in the wrong spot. More searching would have to wait.
That fall, Hunt underwent brain surgery. Doctors implanted two devices similar to a pacemaker in his chest and thin flexible wires in his brain. The devices send mild electrical signals that block some of the brain messages that cause motor dysfunction.
The surgery was a success. It came with a price. He would never be able to dive deep again. Despite that, he felt well enough to make a final push to find the jet.
The final clues
Hunt thought he’d found it. On the sonar the previous year, he identified an object that could only be manmade. Drivers went down to look in May; they found an abandoned tank.
Disappointed, Hunt wracked his brain for how he could refine the search. And then the final clues clicked into place.
The aircrew in both planes saw the spot the jet plunged into the water. Their accounts varied widely. He decided to ignore the accounts.
Everyone believed the currents in the area were fickle. With all the time he’d spent on the Sea Hunt in the area, he’d observed the currents were fairly predictable. He recalled the Coast Guard pulling debris out of the water after the crash, and using those coordinates was able to better pinpoint the probable location of the jet.
That August, staring through the sonar, Hunt was sure he’d finally found wreckage from the jet. But he needed to be sure. He called in divers from Maritime Documentation Society, a nonprofit shipwreck and diving organization. The divers saw a piece of equipment with wires sprouting from it. They photographed it. It had a placard with a serial number.
When Hunt researched it, he learned it was made by Grumman, the company that built the Intruder. He sent a picture to everyone he knew from his old squadron. A supervisor wrote back confirming it was a part from the plane’s cooling system.
Hunt wasn’t ready to announce the find yet.
On Oct. 17, he brought technical divers from the Maritime Documentation Society in Seattle: Dan Warter, Rob Wilson and Paul Hangartner. He waited on board while they probed the depths, taking video. They popped up out of the water and told Hunt it was just a big rock. “Then somebody else said, ‘No, it’s not.’” Grins and high-fives all around.
Hunt figures the jet probably sank to the bottom of the sea intact but after 26 years had deteriorated into pieces. The divers could spot both engines, the main landing gear and debris from the cockpit.
The Intruder will remain in its spot, too badly corroded and too expensive to haul up. Hunt isn’t sharing the exact location.
He accomplished what he set out to do. He plans to write a book about his experience.
“It gave me a win on anybody’s terms,” he said. “I’m not just someone afflicted with a disease. In every way it let me give the finger to Parkinson’s. Hey, I can do this.”
Debra Vaughn: dvaughn@whidbeynewsgroup.com; 360-675-6611, ext. 5075.
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