Connecticut's state archaeologist says he believes a search team has found the site of a 1941 plane crash that killed the namesake of Bradley International Airport.
Nicholas Bellantoni says he is "90 percent" sure that the site under Runway 33 at the airport is where Lt. Eugene Bradley's Curtiss P-40 crashed in August 1941.
Ground-penetrating radar indicated some potential pieces of the wreckage, but more study is needed, according to Bellantoni.
Bradley, a second lieutenant, died in an August 1941 dogfighting exercise at what was then the Windsor Locks Army Air Base, according to the Hartford Courant. At the time, Europe was a full two years into intense combat, and American involvement was imminent, still a few months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
"He went from 5,000 feet vertically into the ground nose first, just plummeted into the ground," Bellantoni told the Courant. "They found engine parts 13 feet down. When they got to the scene the only part of the wreckage visible was the tail."
Bradley's body was quickly removed from the crash site, and crews cleaned the ground up and filled it in with a bulldozer.
"They used a crane to pull the wreck out of the ground to recover the body and then dozed over the site," Bellantoni said.
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The quest to learn what really happened has been going on for 15 years, but recently, the pieces of the puzzle started to come together.
"All of a sudden within a two-month period everything fell in place," he told the Courant. A call from the quartermaster's driver at the time and a scrap of blood-stained parachute cord — saved by one of the soldiers who dug out the plane by hand — came in recently. The radar testing was done in April, and a recent report wrapping that and all the other evidence points to that spot in East Granby.
State transportation officials will have to approve additional tests at the site to confirm that the plane actually did crash there.
