Resting Place

This is a United States Navy C-117D which crashed here on Sólheimasandur beach in Iceland in November 1973.

It's not that straightforward to find the proper background story of what unfolded here, but I think this article by Eliot Stein I found here sums it up pretty nicely:

On November 21, 1973, Captain James Wicke was flying a routine mission across Iceland to a US Naval air station when the weather turned. The temperature plunged to -10°C, Arctic gusts kicked up to 60 MPH, and the carburetor of his C-117 started sucking in ice. After fighting through heavy turbulence, both engines froze solid and quit. The plane was in such thick fog that none of the five passengers could see the end of the wings from their windows, and it grew completely quiet.

The plane was falling over Vatnajökull, the largest glacier in Europe, and plummeting directly toward a jagged 5,000-foot peak. Wicke put out a mayday and frantically tried to restart the engines. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and the men on board knew they were about to die.

Just then, Lieutenant Gregory Fletcher, a 26-year-old pilot in training who had only flown 21 hours in a C-117, grabbed the controls and made the decision to veer south and ditch the plane in the ocean. He knew that hypothermia in the North Atlantic would set in after about 15 seconds, but colliding with the icy crag would kill them all instantly.

When the plane tore out of the clouds at 2,500 feet, Fletcher realized that they were gliding over "some goddamn thing that looked like the moon." He lowered the plane parallel to the shore, used the frozen black-sand beach as a runway, and skidded 90 feet over a sand dune before slowing to a stop 20 feet from the ocean. The propellers were bent, the engine coverings were crushed, and the tanks were ruptured, but Fletcher had saved everyone's life.

You can see photos of the aircraft just after the forced landing here and here, showing that Fletcher had put it down with minimal damage, leaving the fuselage and wings intact. After the crew was picked up, all salvageable items such as the engines and the outer wing portions were removed from the wreckage, while the hulk of the fuselage was simply left there. This was not uncommon, and landowners rarely complained, as everything is rather scarce in Iceland, so a free pile of metal is something that no landowner would turn down.

For over forty years, the wreckage remained here on the volcanic sand, beaten by powerful storms, slowy deteriorating, and probably being picked apart by tourists as well. Being on private land, it's usually not mentioned in any official guides. In fact, we didn't know it was here, we just saw a parking lot just next to the road, with some marker poles in the sand leading away from that lot and into the vast nothingness. No signs, no nothing. As the plane is sitting on a slightly lower part of the beach, you can only see it when you're almost there, requiring some 45 Minutes of brisk walking for roughly 4 kilometers. As many tourists got lost and had to be rescued, the landowners thought that putting up those marker poles was the best course of action. They won't be able to stop us pesky tourists from going there, so at least they made sure that we won't get lost while doing it. Not that long ago, one could drive there, with the appropriate vehicles of course, but after people climbed around on the wreckage and even skateboarded on it, the landowners put a stop to this.

As you can see, I was lucky enough to catch a break in the steady stream of visitors, enabling me to get some shots of just the wreckage without anyone in or near it. This is actually an HDR merged from 8 photos, to make sure that no details were lost in under- or overexposure.