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WWII Hellcat recovered from Lake Michigan

More than 60 years after it went crashing into Lake Michigan, a Navy F6F-3 Hellcat fighter plane was lifted from the water Monday morning.

The plane was covered with sludge but largely intact.

“Relatively speaking, having been down there since 1945, it’s in pretty darn good shape,” said Mark Kish, who works for Larsen Marine in Waukegan, Ill.

The lettering on the side and the gauges in the cockpit were still intact, Kish said.

The aircraft recovery — estimated to cost about $250,000 — was paid for by the chief executive officer of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Andy Taylor. He requested the recovery to honor his father, a World War II naval aviator who flew the Hellcat fighter planes on the carrier Enterprise.

The plane will be sent to the National Naval Aviation Museum in Florida for restoration, according to Taras Lyssenko, owner of the Chicago-based A&T Recovery, which oversaw the two-week recovery project.

Test flights over the Great Lakes were common in the 1940s. Crashes were far more common then too, before the Navy instituted many of today’s safety precautions.

The recovered plane was piloted by Lt. Walter B. Elcock, who survived the crash on Jan. 5, 1945. Elcock, 89, lives in Atlanta, Lyssenko said.

The Navy used the Hellcats from 1943 to 1946 during the peak of the war and phased them out shortly afterward.

The planes were designed to be built quickly and included cockpit armor and bullet-resistant windshields to help pilots survive an attack.