By day, Dr. Patrick Scannon is an executive at a successful biotech company across the bay from San Francisco. But in his spare time, the 59-year-old bearded and bespectacled research scientist is the founder of BentProp, a group of like-minded volunteers dedicated to finding World War II aircraft lost over the remote Pacific islands of Palau. Scannon has hunted missing WWII aircraft for more than 10 years, and though the work is long, arduous and sometimes unsuccessful, he and the other members of BentProp have made some important discoveries.

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To date, BentProp has found 26 American and 23 Japanese aircraft and, working with JPAC (the U.S. military's Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command), has helped locate and identify five sites containing the remains of 15 MIAs. For perspective, the U.S. lists 88,000 MIAs from conflicts around the globe; the majority of these (78,000) date from WWII. In the region around Palau where BentProp operates, more than 200 aircraft were lost during the war, approximately one-third of those with airmen who were subsequently designated MIA.

"Many planes went missing in that part of the Pacific," Scannon explains during an interview in his office. "These men died trying to protect our country. I don't want them to be forgotten. We are grateful. We want to say thank you."

BentProp began as the result of a western Pacific trip that Scannon took in 1993 to dive on a Japanese ship sunk by U.S. Navy Grumman Avengers, including one flown by future president George H.W. Bush, in WWII's closing months. The ship was sunk inside Palau's barrier reef in 40 feet of water. Dan Bailey, an expert on the WWII shipwrecks of Truk and Palau, had already documented the wreck. Nevertheless, the trip made a strong impression on Scannon.

"Afterward, we asked the guide did he know of any other wrecks in the area," Scannon recalls. "He started showing us all these World War II aircraft he didn't know anything about. That's when I had my epiphany. I thought it was wrong nobody knew about these planes. People had to have died. So I set out to correct that."

When he returned to the United States, Scannon began researching the Pacific War and soon learned there had been multiple air campaigns over Palau, with many fierce battles. A few operations lasted days, some weeks, but when you added them all up, a couple of hundred aircraft had been shot down.

"They lost just about every aircraft in the Navy repertoire at that time," Scannon explains, "including Marine Corsairs and TBM Navy Avengers, not to mention B-24s."

As a scientist, Scannon wanted to take a systematic approach to finding WWII aircraft. However, he initially found the job more difficult than he'd anticipated.

"It took me a few years to figure out there's no one source to go to," Scannon says. "In the absence of data, it's hard looking for aircraft."

Nevertheless, Scannon spent three years visiting Palau searching for lost planes. However, after getting disoriented in a mangrove swamp on one such trip he realized "it wasn't smart to go this alone." This led to his forming a team of volunteers in 1999 that became involved in a year-round operation to find WWII aircraft missing as a result of air combat or operational failure.

"We try to build a complete list of what's missing," Scannon says about BentProp's search for specific aircraft. "[But] it [still] takes anywhere from two to 10 years until we find a plane."

BentProp uses a variety of sources to develop its target list, including after-action reports, bombing mission photographs and squadron reunions, as well as countless hours spent deep in the National Archives. Historians in Japan have even pitched in to help. But this sort of historical research is more like detective work than burying one's nose in musty history books. Scannon says it's the people of Palau who are BentProp's best source for lost aircraft.

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