Sometimes Bob Pettway watches the movie and he still cannot believe it’s real.

The footage is on DVD now, transferred from old film long ago. Mostly it’s dry stuff, a training video made for sailors who would fly U.S. Navy aircraft in the early 1960s.

But there it is. He hits pause on the remote and, frozen in time in his living room, is a black-and-white image — an airplane, LA-9 on the tail fin.

“Can you believe that?” he says.

The plane is a P2V-7, one in a squadron of 12 U.S. Navy planes that scoured the seas looking for Soviet submarines during the Cold War. One day in 1962, plane LA-9 flew out of its base in Iceland and never came back.

“That was their first flight out ... and they never returned from it,” recalls Mr. Pettway, who was part of the squadron, known as “Mad Foxes.”

He’d only been with the squadron about six months but knew the men well. They worked together, played together, knew each other’s families. Sitting in a hangar between missions one of the LA-9 crew members, Norman “Fisheye” Russell had taught him Morse code.

The wreckage and remains of the crew were found in 1966 on Greenland, but it took almost 40 years before all the remains were back in the United States and all the families contacted.

Much of that work was done by Mr. Pettway, a Chattanooga resident, who refused to give up on the fliers who had been his friends.

This month, at a dedication ceremony in Jacksonville, Fla., for a refurbished P2V plane, the U.S. Navy honored Mr. Pettway for his service, more than four decades after he left the ranks and nearly 10 years after he began bombarding the Navy with requests to recover his fellow fliers.

He was awarded the Superior Public Service Award for his efforts to bring those fliers home.

“I had mixed feelings. Do you open up old wounds of all these family members?” Mr. Pettway said. “I wrestled with that and said, if it was me and my relatives that were up there, I’d want to go ahead and get them.”

The mission

On Jan. 12, 1962, LA-9 took off on a nine-hour flight to cover 1,500 miles, sweeping northwest from the air station in Keflavik, Iceland, over the Denmark Strait, then looping back to Keflavik, according to Navy reports.

But as squadron commanding officer Capt. Bob Smyth’s journal recounts, “Winter weather in Iceland is very unpredictable — in an hour it can go from a hellish arctic blizzard to a ‘springtime in the Rockies’ kind of day.”

His journal entry recounts the events from the air station that day after the plane took off at 8 a.m.

“At 1130 we still had no contact,” he wrote. “Every radio station in Iceland, Greenland and Europe was trying to contact LA-9. The clock crept ahead — no position reports. Its estimated arrival time of 1600 passed, but LA-9 did not return.”

Up to 16 aircraft at one time searched the seas and coastlines for a week but found nothing. Mr. Pettway said everyone assumed the plane went down in the ocean.

Four years later — in 1966 — Dr. Kent Brooks and a team of Oxford University geologists were trekking across the eastern coast of Greenland to test mineral samples when they found the wreckage of a plane and remains of the crew.

Staff Photo by Lesley Onstott
Bob Pettway, a U.S. Navy veteran, poses with awards he received from the Navy for his efforts in retrieving the remains of men who went down in a crash in 1962.

The team notified the Navy and, within a month, a Navy search crew made it to the site to investigate. Winter had begun and more than 2 feet of snow covered much of the remains. The team had less than 24 hours to gather what they could, according to reports.

Of the 12-member crew, seven were identified using technology available at the time. A mixture of the unidentified remains went into a plot at Arlington National Cemetery with the names of the five men who could not be identified.

For the 12 families, the squadron and the Navy, the story had ended.

But decades later, they would learn that the 1966 recovery mission was only the first chapter.

a knock at the door

Patty Masciantoni remembers eating cereal in her home in Jacksonville, Fla., when there was knock at the door. She was 6 then and she had a different name, the same as her daddy’s — Cmdr. Norbert Kozak, the pilot of the LA-9.

The search ended, and the Navy listed the crew as presumed dead. Mrs. Masciantoni’s mother had to move off the base.

“I remember asking her, ‘Why are we moving?’” she said. “I was thinking he was going to come back.”

Eventually Cmdr. Kozak would return, but it would take almost 40 years.

Mr. Pettway left the Navy and later started a career with the U.S. Secret Service. For 26 years he protected the president and other dignitaries and tracked counterfeiting operations, the last 13 years in Chattanooga.

A few years after he retired in 2000, curiosity got the better of him. He had stayed in touch with some of his Navy buddies, and he and his wife went to reunions for the old squadron. He’d always wondered what happened with the LA-9 crew, the crash, the crash site and anything else he could learn.

So he tracked down a mailing address for Dr. Brooks in Copenhagen, Denmark, and sent him a letter that included his e-mail address.

“In his very first e-mail to me, he told me about going back in 1995,” Mr. Pettway said.

In that expedition, Dr. Brooks had flown over the crash site and seen exposed human remains atop the ice, Mr. Pettway said. The doctor had contacted Greenland, who told the U.S. Navy about the discovery but, as far as Mr. Pettway could find, nothing had been done.

“That didn’t sit real well with me,” he said.

So he decided to do some work himself.

“I thought, naively, all you got to do is dial up the Navy and tell them they’re there and they’ll get them,” he said. “I found out that isn’t the way it works.”

The former Secret Service agent knew it would be an uphill battle, but one worth the fight.

“To get what you want sometimes you have to make enough noise,” he said.

The fight would take mountains of paperwork, national media attention and countless e-mails, but four years later the Navy sent an icebreaking-ship into the area and a crew with forensic scientists collected all remains from the site.

Those remains were returned in 2004.

Mrs. Masciantoni said learning that some of her father’s remains were left on the ice angered her. That they would be left behind, then not recovered after the 1995 discovery, shocked her. She since has talked with a member of the 1966 recovery crew and learned of the challenges they faced in the operation, she said.

She said the four-year process for recovery and the last five years working for DNA matching of the remains — completed for all 12 crew members this spring — were “emotionally draining.”

“There were times I just wanted to give up,” she said. “But then there would be Bob with another e-mail. If he had not taken the role that he did, I don’t think it would have happened.”

She credits Mr. Pettway most for bringing her father home to rest.

“He is just an extraordinary man,” she said. “I know Bob must have been discouraged at times, but he would always sign his e-mails with, ‘We will prevail.’”

But even after nearly half a century, the story has not ended.

“The final closure is still coming,” Mr. Pettway said.

Remains of the other seven crew members will be buried in the plot that now holds the five previously unidentified fliers’ remains sometime early next year.

Mr. Pettway plans to be there.