Original subtitles

Macha: The public needs to be reminded of the 38

who gave their lives on behalf of this nation.

Are we the only two people in the world

who know this thing is sitting here right now?

I mean, it's remarkable.

She flies?

Hell yeah, she flies.

Whoo!

Aye-aye-aye.

Right there, look. Right by those rocks.

That's a wreck.

That's almost a smoking gun.

Oh, my god.

♪

I'd like to introduce you to daring

world war ii pilot tommy tompkins.

Tommy was everything you might expect from a young hero

who made the ultimate sacrifice --

skilled, brave, patriotic.

But considering the era,

there is one thing about tommy that might surprise you.

She was a woman.

Gertrude "tommy" tompkins, she was part of an elite group

of women air force service pilots, codenamed the wasps.

Formed at the height of world war ii,

america's only all-female squadron tested

and transported planes,

carried cargo and ran simulated missions.

On October 26, 1944, tompkins took off from los angeles

in a legendary p-51 mustang.

Soon after, she flew into a fogbank

and has been missing ever since.

All told, 38 wasp air force pilots died in service.

Tommy is the only one still unaccounted for.

Now, at the 75th anniversary of her disappearance,

one of the nation's leading aircraft archaeologists

has retraced her flight path

and found a startling new search zone in the mountains,

and a team of ocean explorers

is using the latest scanning technology

to pinpoint an entirely different search zone

beneath the waves.

I'm shipping out for operation downed wasp.

My mission -- join the search for the missing aircraft

on land and sea

and help piece together the extraordinary final chapter

of one of america's barrier-breaking heroes.

My name is josh gates...

Look! [ laughs ]

...Explorer, adventurer...

That is it!

...And a guy who ends up in some very strange situations.

Ah, ah, aah, haa!

With a degree in archaeology

and a passion for the unexplained,

I travel to the ends of the earth,

investigating the greatest legends in history.

Okay, let's punch it.

This is "expedition unknown."

-- captions by vitac -- www.Vitac.Com

captions paid for by discovery communications

my hunt for missing world war ii pilot

gertrude "tommy" tompkins

starts at los angeles international airport.

Today, lax is the world's fifth-busiest airport.

More than 85 million passengers travel through here each year.

The 11,000-foot river of concrete behind me

is runway 25 left here at lax, but 75 years ago,

it was just a 2,000-foot-long airstrip

at what was then mines field.

At the turn of the 20th century,

this area was nothing but wheat fields and lima beans,

but in 1928, the city built a dirt airstrip

and a single building known as hangar 1.

Today, it still sits in a quiet corner of the airfield,

the last remnant of l.A.'s original airport...

...And the former staging ground for warplanes

being shipped out in world war ii.

This is the exact area where gertrude tompkins took off,

never to be seen again.

♪

to reconstruct the events on the day tompkins disappeared,

I head just south of lax to meet pat macha

and david lane from project remembrance,

a group dedicated to finding aircraft wrecks.

Great to meet you. This is like...

This looks like a war room.

Macha: It is, in a way.

We're looking at aviation accidents, so...

All of these?

...All of these are crash sites,

and that's only a fraction of what's really there.

How many aircraft wrecks have you now cataloged?

I have been to or flown over 800 sites.

But one cold case has dogged pat for decades --

gertrude tompkins.

Let's talk about the wasps.

I think a lot of people, sadly,

don't really know their story.

So the women's air force service pilots

were designed to free up

army pilots for combat duties

and for the women pilots

to ferry aircraft from factory or base to base.

♪

wasps were the first women to fly for the u.S. Military,

stepping up to serve their country in a time of dire need.

Narrator: Graduation day means that they've grown up.

They're army fliers.

As they know, their experience here

has been no interlude for romantic adventure

but a period of intensive training

for a highly important job.

♪

gates: Over the course of the war,

wasps logged more than 60 million miles in the air,

delivering more than 12,000 planes.

But not all of them made it back.

What should we remember about gertrude,

about all the wasps?

The public needs to be reminded

of the good service

of the women's air force service pilots

and the 38 who gave their lives

on behalf of this nation.

This is the 75th anniversary of her disappearance,

and if this case could be solved

or closed in some way,

I think that would be huge,

both for the surviving wasps

and for the public to be reminded

of what people did back then...

-Right. -...How they stood up.

Well, that's why I'm here today...

Yes, exactly.

...To talk about this woman right here.

Right.

So let's talk about her disappearance.

Yes.

She was gonna fly all the way across the country

to newark, new jersey.

Gertrude is one of 40 wasps

set to take off from los angeles.

From the runway, their flight plan

will take them over the pacific,

where they turn back over land to phoenix, arizona,

before heading across the country.

But the canopy on tommy's plane won't latch correctly,

forcing a delay while it's repaired on the field.

By the time the canopy is fixed,

it's too late in the day for her to continue to arizona,

so tommy and two other pilots are rerouted

to palm springs for the night.

She's number three to take off.

Number one takes off.

Number two takes off,

and she's the last one to go.

When the two pilots land at palm springs

and gertrude isn't there, they assume her canopy

was still giving her trouble,

and she landed back at lax.

What would their flight path have been?

Do we know that? Yes, we do.

They would fly green airway 4

right through the san gorgonio pass.

You drop into palm springs.

But she never landed there.

She never landed there.

Airways are imaginary highways in the sky.

Green airway number 4's boundaries are 20 miles wide

with a center lane divider for oncoming traffic.

You can fly anywhere 10 miles either side of the center lane,

so she, technically, could have been

anywhere between here and here.

Dave, from a pilot's perspective,

is there anything that's particularly challenging

about this route?

Yes, there is. Some of the highest terrain

in southern california is right here,

with mt. San jacinto and san gorgonio.

All the desert air sucks in the coastal air

right through here.

I take it all these other pins are clustered

in this area for a reason.

It's a dangerous spot.

They're all crash sites.

And has a search been carried out here?

Not to my knowledge.

I would be very interested to see

what we might see out there.

Hopefully, something that looks like this.

Exactly.

Gates: Based on tompkins' flight path,

one distinct possibility is that she went down

somewhere along the treacherous mountain pass,

so pat, dave and I drive 100 miles east

toward the san jacinto mountains.

On the way, pat shares new intel that may help our search.

This photo was given to me by a man

who snapped it from a fire tower.

We can see that there are two shines that appear.

So whatever that is, it's probably not natural.

I'd say this is man-made material.

Of course, the p-51 was not camouflaged.

It was all natural aluminum.

No more pavement.

It's gonna be a rough ride from here.

♪

oh, you weren't kidding.

Hope you boys have a good chiropractor back at home.

[ laughs ]

after an hour of having our spines

turned into a jenga set, we finally reach the trailhead.

This is it. We're here.

Okay. All right. We walk from here.

Here we go.

While david and I make the grueling 2 1/2-mile ascent

to investigate the mysterious gleams,

pat drives to the fire tower where the photo was taken.

He'll be in radio contact in case we need help

pinpointing the exact location of our target.

Hike up. Hike down. Hike back up.

The terrain grows increasingly rugged as we approach the peak.

I mean, it is just hand-to-hand combat in here.

♪

oh, what a view.

Unbelievable. So what do you think?

Well, from what I can tell, the lookout tower

is on the top of that knoll out there to the west,

so it should be right down below us here, not too far.

Let's go down. Go do it.

See what's down here. Come on.

♪

the crazy thing is this wreck could be 15 feet from us.

I don't think we'd see it.

All these dead pine needles everywhere,

I mean, it just acts like camouflage.

It's a little slick here. Watch out.

Real slippery, yeah.

♪

after an hour of endless switchbacks,

we're nearing our target.

Lane: Hey, I've got something right here.

-You see something? -Right there. Right there.

Right there. Look.

-Ha. -Right by those rocks.

That looks like metal.

Oh, ow. All right. Thorns be damned.

Dave, that is metal for sure.

Yep, it is. Oh, wow.

It's aluminum. This is fantastic.

That's a wreck.

Gates: I'm with aircraft wreck hunter david lane

searching for missing world war ii wasp gertrude tompkins,

who vanished while transporting a p-51 mustang 75 years ago.

Dave, that is metal for sure.

One of her possible flight paths would have taken her

into this mountainous corridor near palm springs.

We've followed the metallic gleam

in a photo to aircraft wreckage.

Lane: Oh, wow.

Gates: I think that's a plane wreck.

Oh, my word.

Hey. Good job.

Unbelievable. Yeah.

I'm speechless.

I cannot believe this is actually an aircraft.

Something really intriguing about this,

dave, that I don't see, is a lot of paint.

Her plane was unpainted, right?

Unpainted, yep.

What do we need to say that this is gertrude's plane?

Well, the best way to be identified would be

to try to find the engine, which is a merlin v-12.

The p-51 mustang was fast and powerful,

with a top speed of 437 miles per hour.

It could fly above 15,000 feet

to take on german luftwaffe fighters.

Its performance was due in part to its powerful engine.

The 12-cylinder merlin, designed by rolls-royce

and manufactured in the usa,

could produce a staggering 1,600 horsepower.

More wreckage.

We continue combing the debris field,

looking for a smoking gun.

[ birds chirping ]

up. We got more.

That's the prop. That's the engine.

♪

look at that.

Yeah, if we can count the number of cylinders

that go around,

that would help identify what type it is.

We'll start here. Yes.

So one, two, three, four.

Four, five, six.

-Six, seven. -Seven cylinders.

The p-51 had a much larger 12-cylinder v-shaped engine.

So we could say, to a surety,

not gertrude's missing plane.

Unfortunately not, due to the...

We have the wrong engine type,

and we got a two-bladed propeller here,

and the mustang had four, right?

Exactly.

A downed aircraft, nonetheless,

sitting out here in the wilderness.

Yeah. It's a sobering thought.

You know, you really need to pay respect

to any site like this

because it probably involved a fatality.

I'm standing here thinking, you know,

"are we the only two people in the world

who know this thing is sitting here right now?"

I mean, it's remarkable.

This is one of those reminders, too,

that gertrude's not alone, you know what I mean?

There are aircraft like this all over the world

and people that are missing

and stories that haven't been fully told.

Mm-hmm.

And it's the mission of project remembrance

to make sure these stories are never forgotten.

Later, pat and david will determine

that the 7-cylinder engine we found

belonged to a cessna 195,

a civilian aircraft produced between 1947 and 1954.

Only about 1,000 of these planes were ever built.

Pat and dave will make sure this crash site is fully documented

and not abandoned.

Meanwhile, I'm off to look for new leads

in the case of tommy tompkins

in the wide-open plains of sweetwater, texas.

This place is known as avenger field.

It's a name that sounds like it comes from a comic book,

and this place's origin story reads like one

because here, at the height of world war ii,

a group of highly skilled women

were trained to become real-world superheroes.

Welcome to the home of the wasps.

♪

today, it's a museum dedicated to preserving the legacy

of these groundbreaking air force pilots.

25,000 women applied to the program,

but only 1,074 completed

the 6-month gauntlet of army training,

thousands of hours of military drills and ground

and flight training,

to earn their wings,

and I'm meeting one of these elite pilots in person --

97-year-old wasp veteran nell stevenson bright.

Nell is a bona fide american war hero.

She was also tommy's classmate and might be able to offer

critical insight into her disappearance.

First of all, thanks for taking the time to talk with me.

Well, it's a pleasure.

It's an honor for me, really.

I'm amazed by the story of the wasps.

How would you describe the training?

It was very difficult.

We had the same training as the men.

The full army experience?

The full army experience.

How many different types of planes did you fly?

I believe it was 19.

19 different aircraft?

Most men were trained to fly on one plane.

Right.

You would fly the b-25,

doing what's called towing targets.

That means that you would tow something behind the plane,

and people would shoot at it.

That's right, real bullets.

People that were learning how to shoot.

That's right.

You're either fearless or nuts.

Now, which is it?

That's your orders. That's what you do...

Yeah. ...In the military.

That's right.

Gates: Yet, despite taking the same risks

as their male counterparts,

the wasps were considered civilians.

They had to wear hand-me-down men's uniforms.

Their pay was lower, and if a wasp died in service,

the army didn't even cover their funeral expenses.

It took a long time for the wasps

to be recognized for their service.

Yes, it did.

We finally got our veteran status in 1977.

In 2010, the wasps were also awarded

one of the highest honors bestowed by the government,

the congressional gold medal.

And now nell is hoping for another overdue victory --

solving the mystery of her missing sister-in-arms,

gertrude "tommy" tompkins.

This is her in this photo back here?

Is that her, I think, back there?

Yes, it is. That's her.

She looks a bit shy in that photo.

She was shy. Yeah.

She was a very good pilot.

She was. She was just all business.

I can remember be scared to death

we were gonna wash out and everything,

and tommy was always very calm about it

and would say,

"don't worry, girls, you'll be just fine."

she was always confident.

Do you have a theory

as to what might've happened to her?

Well, they would have to take a plane

right off the assembly line

before they took it to cross-country.

Right, so this is a plane with no hours on it.

That's right.

I would say it was definitely the plane and not her.

♪

tompkins' p-51 was untested.

To find out if the plane itself played a role in her crash,

I head back to southern california...

...To meet expert pilot chris liguori.

Hey, josh. Welcome. Hey. How are you, man?

Good.

Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you as well.

This is the p-51 mustang? This is it.

This is the legendary p-51d mustang.

What makes the mustang a challenge?

It's got a laminar-flow wing, which was new to the day.

Okay.

It doesn't give you a lot of warning

when it's done flying, when the wing is gonna stall.

Okay.

The first-of-its-kind wing reduced drag

and made the p-51 faster and more fuel efficient,

but like its wild-horse namesake,

the mustang was also unpredictable.

They would have had an 85-gallon fuel tank

behind the pilot's seat, and the problem there is

that it shifts the center of gravity aft on the airplane.

That, and combined with this laminar-flow wing,

if you lose control of the airplane,

it's really hard to recover.

And the fact that tompkins' canopy wasn't closing properly

and had to be fixed on the fly

added to the hazard she faced that day.

I think the important thing in trying to figure out

what happened to tompkins is understanding her movements

right after she took off.

Really, the only way to experience it

is to go out and do it, so what do you say?

She flies? Hell yeah, she flies.

Wow. It's cozy.

This is cool.

All right. Here we go.

[ engine pops ]

♪

she's alive.

Here we go, man.

Woman: Mustang 44727, camarillo bound,

foxtrot runway 26 10c via foxtrot alpha.

Chris, is this a parachute behind your seat?

I can't help but notice

that I'm not sitting on a parachute.

Very good observation there, josh.

♪

aye-aye-aye. Whoo!

Gates: I'm on the hunt for missing world war ii

wasp pilot gertrude "tommy" tompkins,

who vanished in 1944 after taking off from l.A.

In a p-51 mustang.

♪

now I'm flying in an identical aircraft

to try to understand what went wrong.

Wow. She got some power.

Yeah. She'll get up and go, that's for sure.

Whoo, feel those g's when it turns.

Awesome.

Chris banks and dives, putting the p-51 through her paces,

but turning on a dime at 300-plus miles an hour

means that the smallest mistake can lead to deadly consequences.

Ligouri: So this is gonna be a left break.

Okay.

Whoo!

Aye-aye-aye. [ laughing ]

holy [bleep]

you liked that one, huh? Yeah.

That got a little tunnel-y there for a second for me.

Even seasoned pilots struggle to remain conscious

when pulling high-g-force maneuvers.

If tompkins' hastily repaired canopy flew open

just after takeoff,

she may not have had time to recover.

With that canopy problem, she could've got disoriented,

maybe lost control of the airplane,

but that's a theory.

Or it could have been this issue with the mustang itself,

the way the fuel tank and the center of gravity is.

What's clear though is that it's absolutely reasonable

that there could have been a problem

right out of the gate.

Yeah, statistically speaking,

the first power reduction after takeoff

is when you're gonna encounter the most trouble.

And much like lax is situated today,

you come off this runway, you're basically

right out over the water almost immediately.

That's correct.

We've investigated the theory

that tompkins may have crashed en route to palm springs,

but I'm now understanding that it's entirely possible

she wrecked in the water immediately after takeoff.

I'll tell you what, chris. Sitting in this plane right now,

I feel a whole new connection to this story.

Yowzers.

Oh, you feel the g's.

As we soar over the seemingly endless california coastline,

it's a sobering thought to know

that tommy could be right beneath us.

All right, josh. We are done here, my friend.

♪

chris isn't the only one who believes that tompkins

crashed into the ocean immediately after takeoff.

At the nearby los angeles flight path museum,

I'm meeting with investigators pete kelsey and scott pawlowski,

who believe they've uncovered evidence that proves it.

Pleasure to meet you. Okay.

So I've just taken a flight in the p-51 mustang,

and, really, being up there made me realize

just how many potential contributing factors

there were right at the beginning

of gertrude's flight.

Yes.

So any number of things combined could wind up

with tommy tompkins in the water.

Gates: Scott and pete have unearthed a treasure trove

of formerly classified military documents,

including the statement of another pilot

in her squadron that day.

She says, "after leaving at the end of the runway,

I was in the haze."

she says that, "between 2,500 to 3,000 feet,

it was impossible to see the ground or water."

literally, you're taking off into the fog here.

Right.

Got a copy here of an internal communique

from the military folks.

It says, "subject aircraft took off together

on runway 25,

but only two seen to circle back across field

on course to palm springs."

so there was no visual sighting of her plane

coming back across land.

That's almost a smoking gun.

Exactly. We certainly agree,

and that's why she has to be in the water.

Why hasn't anybody found her?

It's a big ocean out there.

Classic needle in a haystack problem.

So how do you find the needle?

Technology.

Gates: To see that technology firsthand,

we rendezvous early the next morning with scott

and pete's investigation team in marina del rey.

We board a large survey vessel

accompanied by a dive support boat

with two mixed-gas deep divers.

And we set a course for the waters just offshore from lax.

We reach the search zone,

and underwater survey expert chad nelson

introduces me to his high-tech toys.

Okay. Look at this.

They look dangerous, first of all.

Let me start by saying that.

These are sonar units, right?

Yep. This is a auv, autonomous underwater vehicle.

So, in layman's terms, this thing drives itself?

Drives itself.

We program it on the surface, put it in the water.

It does its thing, and then we pick it up when it's finished.

And if I wanted to pick up one of these bad boys for myself,

what's that gonna set me back, chad?

These two here will cost you about $500,000 or $600,000,

depending on the configuration. Sure.

And this one over here is running roughly about a million.

A million dollars, sure, that seems reasonable.

Gates: I hold my breath and hope chad has got insurance

as we drop the top-dollar tech into the drink...

All right, chad. It's away.

...And watch it disappear.

All right. Starting mission.

♪

gates: Equipped with side-scan sonar,

the device records a detailed map of the ocean floor,

revealing whatever is hiding in the depths.

While we kill time on deck

watching the endless line of planes taking off from lax,

the auv runs its preprogrammed search grid.

Two hours later, it returns home.

Gates: Okay. So we've got our auv back.

Yep. We have some really good targets to look at.

The most promising one is this here.

So you can see that we have some large pieces of debris.

Oh, yeah.

Doesn't look like a plane, but then again,

maybe looking for pieces, right?

Right.

One of the heavy items that would be really resistant

to corrosion over all these decades,

so engine block, landing gear, the prop...

Machine guns. ...Machine guns, the canopy,

which was unique to this model of the...

Right, that plexiglass would still be down there.

Right. Okay.

So we're looking for parts, really.

Yeah. Okay. What else we got?

All right. So we have this target here.

That's a large object.

You've got a length of about 9 meters.

What's the wingspan on that mustang?

We're in the neighborhood.

We are. How much water is that in?

Oh, this is in about, I'd say 80 feet.

Now, that, I can get down to,

so might be able to scuba-dive down to that.

That's really cool.

Okay. What else we got?

All right. So we have this target here,

which is just on the deeper end of our survey.

We've got a large piece of debris,

lot of scouring around the debris field,

which means that it's probably been sitting

on the ocean bottom for a little while.

And this depression here,

is that because something heavy is there?

Yep.

Like an engine block?

Like merlin engine block

and maybe three machine guns off to the right?

Yeah, that would be nice, wouldn't it?

Is it me, or does everything look like a p-51?

Exactly. Exactly.

But definitely something down there,

something fairly large. Yes.

Why don't we check out the shallower targets first?

I'll go over to the dive boat,

and we can go down from over there,

and then we can chat while I'm down there.

-Yeah, sounds good. -Yeah?

After that, we'll attack those deeper targets,

and that's gonna have to be with the mixed-gas divers.

You're the man, chad. Yeah.

Okay. All right. Let's do it.

-Excellent. -Let's do it.

Let's see what's down there.

Come on.

Gates: We motor out to our first site.

While I prepare to dive,

chad's team deploys a remote-operated vehicle,

or rov, equipped with a camera and sonar

to help guide us to the debris field.

♪

I see josh. Hey, josh.

We got eyes on you up here.

That's it, josh, if you just head

right on the bearing you're on.

I make my way down to the ocean floor

and begin searching for anything

that could be a piece of tompkins' p-51.

♪

gates: I'm searching for the wreck

of gertrude tompkins' p-51 mustang.

Missing for 75 years,

tompkins was part of an elite group of female

world war ii pilots known as wasps.

Now I'm diving in santa monica bay

near where she took off to investigate

the possible crash site of her plane,

and there's something down here.

I swim closer and pull up a piece of debris

to try to identify the wreckage.

Josh, what do you see?

This could be the smoking gun we need to I.D. Tompkins' plane.

Half-buried, it looks like a landing gear.

I finally break the object free from the sand

and recognize it immediately.

This can only be one thing...

A toilet.

But wow.

That is -- that is really something.

It's a large vessel, and the fixture suggests

that it's been down here a while,

an incredible find lost to the depths for decades.

We carefully document the mystery wreck and its location

so we can pass along the discovery

to maritime historians.

For now, the ship is too decayed to tell exactly what it was,

but I did find the poop deck.

More targets to search for.

Come on up.

I make my way to the surface

and rendezvous with the team topside.

Oh, for a split second,

I thought that was an airplane wing.

I know. I know.

I mean, it looked just like it, didn't it?

We weren't breathing up here, man.

I know. But, hey, another target down.

Another target down.

Okay. Let me get back on board.

We'll look at some of those deeper targets, yeah?

Yeah.

Once I wash my hands,

we move on to our deep-water readings.

At 140 feet, our next target area

is almost beyond scuba depth,

but it's not out of reach for our technical diving team.

They work with a special nitrogen gas mixture

that allows them to stay deeper longer.

While the divers gear up, we deploy the rov.

Okay. Rov is in.

Man: 90 feet.

It rapidly descends toward our target.

Okay. -Okay.

Man: On the bottom.

Okay. We're on the bottom.

Gates: The divers descend into the murky depths,

slowly working their way down the ship's anchor line.

Divers, we have eyes on you from the surface.

We see you with the rov.

Okay. Let's see if we can find that target.

The divers and rov split up to search for the debris field

we saw in the scans,

and the rov is swarmed by a school of fish.

You don't have a speargun on this rov, do you?

No. We keep asking for them to make the attachment.

I mean, we could have dinner in the bag right now.

Right?

Gates: But our seafood buffet will have to wait.

The divers spot the first signs of the anomaly

we picked up on the sonar.

Yeah. We're seeing it, too.

That's wreckage for sure.

So a piece of metal.

That looks like it might be cable.

We're looking for serial numbers,

aluminum, aviation parts.

Chad brings the rov in close,

carefully inspecting every piece of flotsam and jetsam.

Another piece of metal.

Boy, I was hoping that was landing gear, but it's not.

Let's look around the inside of this piece of metal.

Is that riveted?

Yep.

Gates: These may be metal fragments from a plane wreck,

but we still need definitive proof,

a serial number or a part specific to the p-51

to positively I.D. This as tompkins' aircraft.

What the hell is that?

A steering column or something...

-Right. -...But it's not.

I mean, I don't know what that is.

But more of that aluminum-looking stuff.

-Yeah. -Yeah.

That is tantalizing.

I need an m2 .50 caliber machine gun.

-Don't we all? -Yeah.

[ laughter ]

gates: We continue to survey the site,

uncovering more scattered bits of debris,

all enticing, but inconclusive

until we stumble on something jaw-dropping.

And whoa, whoa, whoa. What is that?

Heyo. Ho, ho, ho, what is that?

What the hell is that?

Oh, my god.

That is an oxygen cylinder, world war ii era.

That's world war ii.

Absolutely. Ha.

They would definitely have had oxygen tanks

on that mustang.

Absolutely.

Gates: Exploration is always a complicated logistics puzzle.

I like to think that my team is the best in the business,

but sometimes the little things get overlooked.

I swam from that boat to this boat after my dive,

but they forgot to send over my underwear.

Okay. Don't mess this up.

We got you covered, josh.

I guess this is why mom always told me

to wear clean underwear.

I got them. We're good.

We're good. I have underwear.

I have underwear.

Thanks, mom.

♪

gates: I'm on a search mission in santa monica bay.

75 years ago,

world war ii pilot gertrude tompkins

took off from lax in a p-51 mustang and disappeared,

and now we may have just discovered the wreckage.

What is that?

Heyo. Ho, ho, ho, what is that?

What the hell is that?

Oh, my god.

That is an oxygen cylinder, world war ii era.

That's world war ii.

Absolutely. Ha.

They would definitely have had oxygen tanks

on that mustang.

Absolutely.

♪

gates: This is a major historic find.

Oxygen canisters just like this were used during the war

by pilots flying in unpressurized cabins.

We're hanging out over here next to this cylinder.

It's an o2 bottle.

We want to try to get it to the surface.

Copy that. Sounds like a plan.

The divers secure an inflatable bladder

to the canister that they can fill with air from their tanks

to lift our discovery to the surface.

Okay. There's the float bag, and the air is going in.

This is gonna happen fast. Are we ready, everybody?

Copy that. We'll be waiting for it up here.

Yeah. They're gonna fill it up.

-Coming up. -Okay. Here we go.

Nelson: The balloon is filling.

On its way. It's coming up.

Gates: Okay. It's coming up.

Anybody see it?

No, it should be in here somewhere.

-There. -There we go.

Okay. Float bag is up.

Here we go.

Okay. We got it hooked.

We scramble to reach the canister.

One false move, and this piece of world war ii history

could sink back down into the sand and be lost forever.

Okay. We ready?

Here we go. One...

-Yep. -...Two, three.

Okay. It's on the deck.

Okay. Woo-hoo-hoo.

Oh, look at that.

Hadn't seen the daylight in 70-odd years.

We secure the oxygen canister aboard the boat,

but the question remains, can we trace it to tompkins' p-51?

Unbelievable. It is an o2 cylinder.

You can see the threading here where the gauge goes on.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah. -See if we can turn it.

I don't see any serial numbers. Do you?

-No. -All right.

No serial numbers, but, visually, unmistakable.

Unmistakable.

Gertrude certainly would have had o2 cylinders in the p-51.

That's right. I agree.

So now we got to go back, look at the diagrams,

look at the plans, see if this came from a p-51.

Whether it does or it doesn't,

what an amazing piece of history we have here.

Absolutely.

That is a piece of history right there.

Sure is.

Waiting 70-odd years for us to come find it.

That is awesome.

♪

gates: After studying world war ii aircraft schematics,

pete and scott determined that the canister

is not the model that was used in tompkins' p-51 mustang.

However, it is the style found in b-25 bombers.

And that's not all.

It turns out a b-25 crashed in the area during a test flight

on February 27, 1946, and was never fully recovered.

The three men on board perished,

and it seems we just unearthed a piece of their wreckage.

Gertrude "tommy" tompkins is still missing,

but we were able to bring closure

to two cold-case aircraft wrecks,

the san jacinto cessna and the b-25 in santa monica bay.

The wasps proudly flew under the motto,

"we live in the wind and the sand,

and our eyes are on the stars."

they believed in the ideals of hard work and dedication

to a greater cause.

These pioneering pilots who trained for

and performed military jobs

were classified as civilians and overlooked by history

simply because they were women,

but, nevertheless, they persisted,

paving the runway for future generations of female pilots.

Now it's up to all of us to make sure that tompkins' story

and the history of these fearless fliers

will never be lost.