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Comment by s_dev | Hacker News Reader

>Don't. Just leave it. Be happy it was found, but just be respectful and leave it.

I don't see anything inherently disrespectful about rasing the plane from the seabed. I recall people telling James Cameron that he should leave the Titanic alone but he made a great movie and brought the ship back in to the public imagination and didn't disrespect the fact many souls were lost tragically. The ship was deemed not economically viable to salvage but this plane is much much smaller and it may be worth putting in a museum.

I'm presuming you are offended on behalf of other people but if not can you elaborate why you find the idea so offensive or disrespectful?

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> I recall people telling James Cameron that he should leave the Titanic alone

I think HumblyTossed is suggesting this group do exactly what Cameron did: investigate and document but not remove. If this is Earhart's plane, it's probably also her grave. We generally frown on disturbing the resting places of the dead for commercial purposes.

What "worth" do you see in placing it in a museum?

So people can know about it

Example: https://www.facebook.com/RoyalAviationMuseumofWesternCanada/...

We don’t frown on that at all, nor do we apply any sacred virtue to graves comprised of accidental wrecks.

While I agree with you, there's sarcophagi in museums all over the world.

And on the tour these days, you are more likely to year "Yeah, maybe we shouldn't have moved it".

> If this is Earhart's plane, it's probably also her grave.

Only because no one knew where she was to bury her properly.

I assume you don't say that we shouldn't recover bodies from ANY plane crash; most people would expect bodies to be moved from a plane crash to be buried properly.

Why is this one different? The length of time it took to find the crash, I assume. So how long before we can't move the body because it is a grave? 3 months? A year? 10 years?

I don't think I would consider this a grave, and recovering the body and burying it properly is not grave robbing.

That's super fair - I think recovery and reburial is probably a respectful option. My impression is that our decisions about what to do with human remains often relies on finding a living member of the family to speak about preferences. To go back to the titanic example - I don't know of any families who agitated to have the remains in the ship reburied. One of the ways this situation is different is that there would be no ambiguity about remain identification.

> I don't think I would consider this a grave

If by not a "grave" you mean not an "intentional burial site" I agree. But it would be a final resting place and, to the question I was answering ("why would people object") that's a thing that people care about being handled with the proper care and consideration.

Yeah, this one is always a tricky topic for me because I have literally zero emotional response to human remains and really don't care at all what is done with my remains or the remains of my loved ones. Once a person is dead, the body is just random matter to me.

Trying to guess how other people would feel about things is a complete academic exercise in this case for me.

There are no bodies to recover. The crabs ate them long ago

> What "worth" do you see in placing it in a museum?

The same value as anything else in a museum? It's historically important, and also really cool, the kind of thing that inspires kids and even adults.

(I saw Halifax W1048 at an impressionable age and am very glad I did)

Because there's little to be gained save morbid curiosity. She did amazing things alive, celebrate that. Putting a wreck in a museum will emphasize her death.

Enjoy disagreeing...

That’s such an odd opinion. Her death is already emphasized whenever the disappearance is mentioned because it’s super interesting. Being concerned that someone who died doing something interesting will have their death emphasized is just super weird imo. Everyone in history is dead.

Her disappearance is emphasized. Her death is not. There is a difference.

But like, who cares? It kinda just doesn’t seem like a big deal to me. I really don’t get it.

The big problem with Titanic is how deep it is. Very, even by ocean standards.

Titanic (12,500ft) is pretty close to average ocean depth (12,080ft).

The Pacific is several thousand feet deeper on average than the Atlantic, though. Especially the parts of the Atlantic near the US mainland are quite shallow, with the continental shelf extending outwards well offshore. I guess it would have been more accurate to say that for a ship in the major Atlantic shipping lanes, Titanic is quite deep.

Even looking for Titanic was a cover story in the first place. They were actually looking for a sunken Russian sub that was sorta in the area. It was only when they had a bit of left over time at the end of the mission that they ACTUALLY found Titanic, almost accidentally.

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