Buried Treasure: World War II Spitfires To Be Unearthed in Burma (TIME)

By Sonia van Gilder Cooke | @svangildercooke | April 17, 2012

It’s like something out of an Indiana Jones film, if you take away the religious overtones and ophidiophobic adventurer. After 15 years, a British farmer’s quest to find a squadron of legendary fighter planes lost in Burma during World War II has finally paid off.

Lincolnshire farmer David Cundall, 62, has spent £130,000, traveled to Burma a dozen times and negotiated with the cagey Burmese government, all in the hopes of finding a stash of iconic British Spitfires buried somewhere in the Southeast Asian country.

(PHOTOS: Burma’s landmark elections, and Aung San Suu Kyi’s path to victory)

Buried planes? It sounds odd, but in fact this was fairly common towards the end of the war; as the conflict wound down and jet aircraft promised to make the prop-driven fighters obsolete, many aircraft were scrapped, buried or sunk by allied forces in order to prevent them falling into enemy hands.
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After a decade and a half of searching, he finally managed to locate the missing airplanes, which had never been flown and were indeed buried while still in their transport crates. “We sent a borehole down and used a camera to look at the crates. They seemed to be in good condition,” Cundall told the Telegraph.
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more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/04/17/buried-treasure-world-war-ii-spitfires-to-be-unearthed-in-burma/?hpt=hp_t3#ixzz1sKTdlpKi