[DF: So they read the Annals of the Brewster Buffalo too?] Oh,
absolutely. The capital
of Karelia is Petrozavodsk, and there are guys in Petrozavodsk
who stay abreast of the Brewster. As a matter of fact, there were
two guys at Petrozavodsk who over the years had been running
their own expeditions looking for this particular aircraft, but
they were never able to find it. And oddly enough this lake is
about two miles long and about half a mile wide, and the only
spot in the lake that was deep enough to cover the aircraft was
the particular spot that it sank in. And believe me, that bottom
depth of 50 feet is only maybe half the size of a football field.
The rest of the lake is less than 10 feet deep. So it was ironic
that the aircraft had actually sunk in the deepest part of the
lake.
I hired a Russian diving team, about eight divers, and we
packed in six tons of equipment--rafts and pumps and we just had
equipment like there was no tomorrow. We were 60 kilometers from
the closest road. We packed that equipment in there, and they
built a raft, and a tripod on the raft. They suspended the
aircraft from the bottom of the raft, and we float the raft into
shallow water. They put tractor tubes? under the wings and the
tail and the nose and sequentially inflated it until we floated
it to the surface and got it to the shore. Then we built an
on-land tripod to lift the aircraft up and actually get it onto
the shore.
Subsequently we built a bigger tripod, lifted the aircraft up,
dropped the landing gear down, and that's when we started to take
all of the extraneous items off the aircraft. And we subsequently
took it out with a helicopter.
I had about 30 hours of video with me and about 700 pictures, and
when I got out of Dodge I had all the videos and the pictures
with me. We had two cameras of VHS-C and 8 mm, and we loaded the
VHS-C with blank tape, but when we went to take the 8 mm tape out
of the camera, the battery was dead, and so we couldn't get the
tape out, so when the police came and confiscated the aircraft
they got the camera, and those are the pictures off that 8 mm
tape that you're seeing [on Finnish TV]. We now have that tape
back.
That was when they had started shooting. They were shooting the
guns at my people. I had left the day before because I had gotten
word that the police were coming, and when they got there they
started trying to scare my people into telling them where the
rest of the parts of the aircraft were--you know, like making
them dance with a .45.
The engine at that time was in the water.
The video on that camera is a combination, video that we took and
video that they took with that camera after they confiscated it.
In one of those pictures you'll see that there is a guy squatting
down in front of the Brewster while it's sitting on the bank, I
think before we had put the landing gear down, that guy is an
American. He is the only American in any of those pictures.
The tires on that aircraft were actually quite surprising. They
were made by Nokia, the phone company. The engine is a [Wright
Cyclone] 1820-5G I think. I've talked to the pilots of these
aircraft that are still alive, and they told me that they never
hung a Russian engine on any of their actual aircraft. This
particular plane had 10 kills painted on the tail, 4 biplanes
which I'm sure were Polikarpov I-15s. The other 6 aircraft were
I'm sure either Hurricanes or something.
They arrested the whole team. By that time the divers had left,
and I think we had 5 people left in our team, they were on the
lake the day that I left, and they were all arrested. They were
all Russian.
If you can imagine it being like the Mafia, it's worse than that.
Yeah, the Mafia runs the whole country. I went to Moscow and
enlisted the help of some of my friends there. They were able to
send friends in the aviation business, a team, to Karelia to
negotiate with the Attorney General, get my people out of prison,
and get the train back on the track.
We sent the same team that they had put in prison back in. They
recovered the engine, moved the aircraft [by helo] to an
aerodrome not too far away, about 50 miles away, packed the
aircraft for shipment to Moscow, packed up all the parts--machine
guns, so forth and so on--we trucked the aircraft to Moscow and
subsequently containerized it for shipment
I'd be pleased to tell you the price, but only for your own
information. The price tag to get that aircraft out of Karelia
was [figure deleted since Mr. Villiard didn't mean for it to be
published]. The Finns paid $58,000 for them.
I'm a New Englander by birth. After I got out of the Marine Corps
I came down here and got involved in a helicopter business here
in Louisiana and had my own company for about 8 years. In 1992 I
sold the company, and to be honest, the Brewster has been most of
what I've been doing since mid-1993. [DF: How old are you?] 46.
The plane will probably go directly to Pensacola. [Talk of
getting the people who restore for the Smithsonian to rebuild
it.] This aircraft is serial number 37.
The seatback armor for this particular aircraft, which we
recovered with the aircraft, had a thirty-caliber round dead
center in the back of it, which did not penetrate the armor but
which cracked the armor from the center to the righthand side,
and was actually put into the aircraft in this particular
dogfight. So the pilot without that armor would have gotten a
thirty-caliber round right through his body. It's three-eighths
of an inch [thick].
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