A World War II aircraft crash
A Midway Corsair
Wreck in 3D.
In search of
F4U-1 BuNo 02326.
A wreck beneath the Pacific
An F4U Corsair wreck rests on the seafloor near Midway. The aircraft is a wartime loss, but its exact identity has not been conclusively established.
Historical records identify F4U-1 Bureau Number 02326 as a plausible candidate. It was reported lost near Midway on June 22, 1943, after being piloted by 1st Lt. Other F. Smith. That association remains a lead, not a confirmed identification recovered from the wreck.
While the identity of this wreck likely leads to a 1943 loss associated with F4U-1 BuNo 02326, its exact identity remains a mystery more than 80 years later.
The reconstruction
Explore the upside-down Corsair in 3D.
Interactive 3D model. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom, and hold Shift while dragging to move.
Built with RL Create3D
A difficult image set. A useful result.
The underwater source photographs present a demanding reconstruction problem: low contrast, suspended material, uneven visibility, and moving fish and fellow divers compete with the aircraft surface. Despite the apparent noise in the scene, RL Create3D matched all 166 supplied photographs with 100% accuracy. The resulting reconstruction is presented here for close inspection.
Explore this historic aircraft wreck—a tangible trace of the Pacific War and the struggle for freedom during World War II.
Selected source frames show fish, divers, and other visual interference crossing the wreck during capture.
Historical context
The Corsair in its own time.
Sources and acknowledgments
The sources behind the reconstruction.
This feature draws on Pacific Wrecks research, the Open Heritage 3D source dataset, and historical Corsair reference photographs.
Read the F4U-1 BuNo 02326 research →