"We discover, they recover," Scannon says, summarizing BentProp's relationship with JPAC. "We're in constant contact with them."

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BentProp's most spectacular find to date took almost 10 years to locate. It was an Army Air Forces B-24 that had been shot down and crashed inside Palau's barrier reef. Scannon eventually found the silt-covered wreck in 40 feet of water. A recent 70-minute documentary titled Last Flight Home tells the moving story of BentProp's search and identification of the B-24.

"We had given up on finding it," Scannon recalls, "but we found bombing mission photographs in a Pennsylvania warehouse that showed a splash where the B-24 went down. That changed everything."

Three crewmen managed to parachute out of the bomber (a navigator, a photographer and a bombardier) before it hit the ocean, but several men perished in the aircraft. BentProp located the aircraft in 2004 as well as the remains of the missing crewmen inside along with unexploded ammunition from .50-caliber machine guns. JPAC later recovered the remains and is using DNA testing among other means to identify the airmen.

When an MIA is successfully identified, BentProp sometimes plays a role in helping JPAC locate the crewmen's family. "We have genealogists who so love what we do, they volunteer to help us find the families," Scannon notes. It's not always easy finding relatives more than six decades later, so BentProp's genealogists use old newspapers and census reports, birth and death records and even out-of-date telephone directories to locate dispersed families. When BentProp locates a previous MIA's relative, Scannon places a call.

"There's almost a predictable cycle: disbelief, realization, accommodation," he says about MIA families. "Once they get over the disbelief, it's a really emotional moment."

Scannon has discovered that the first generation of MIA relatives usually have come to terms with their loss even if they've been reluctant to talk about it with other family members. Regardless, he finds that MIAs are never forgotten no matter how reticent an immediate survivor may be. In Scannon's experience, second-generation family members often maintain a surprisingly high degree of interest in the missing relative even though they may only have scanty information about what actually happened. "MIAs transcend generations," Scannon reports. "There is no closure until the body is returned."

JPAC holds a memorial ceremony for every recovered crewman either in Hawaii or Palau, and the remains are then flown back to the States on a C-130, proof of the U.S. military's doctrine of no man left behind. An American flag used in the ceremony is also presented to family members.

"There's a lot of thank-yous back and forth when a flag is given to the families," Scannon says. "They thank us, and we thank them for their sacrifice. That's our reward."

Because BentProp interviews surviving veterans who knew the MIA, Scannon says he sometimes gets to know an airman's personality, which helps him form a personal bond with the missing crew member. "I'm a scientist, and I try to use the same principles [when searching for aircraft]," he says. "I try to be objective…[but] there is undoubtedly an emotional component to all this."

The two questions most frequently asked of Scannon are whether he lost a family member in WWII, and who pays for BentProp's search and identification operations. Surprisingly, Scannon himself lost no family members in the war. However, it's no surprise to hear that BentProp's volunteers pay the cost of the search and identification missions out of their own pockets. This is very much in keeping with the self-funded nature of the project. The cost of each mission is somewhere between $10,000 and $12,000, which is significant, but you never hear complaints from BentProp's volunteers.

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