Nearly 75 years after it sank, an airplane known as the "Ghost of Charron Lake" is being resurrected, piece by piece.

The Western Canada Aviation Museum has been working for decades to locate and recover the Fokker Standard Universal, which sank in the Manitoba lake after an emergency landing in 1931.

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The "Ghost of Charron Lake" rests on the bottom of the northeastern Manitoba lake in this photo by the recovery team.
(Photo courtesy Western Canada Aviation Museum)
A team of divers and technicians has been working for a couple of weeks, trying to bring the plane to the surface. They recovered its engine and propeller on Sunday.

Both were still in great condition, said Pat Madden, one of the leaders of the recovery mission.

"It's not an easy task to lift a 600-pound engine from 120 feet in zero visibility," he said.

Charron Lake
Charron Lake

"The divers are down there doing everything through touch and feel. The engine was half-buried in the silt and we were able to recover it. That's a big accomplishment."

The team hopes to recover the plane's wings, instruments and cargo on Monday.

The fuselage will not be brought up during this mission; Madden said the main section of the plane is too fragile to try to recover.

Rare aircraft

The Fokker Standard Universal, a model widely used for northern cargo transport in the 1920s, is one of only a few of the rare aircraft that has survived the years in salvageable condition.

While flying supplies for prospectors from Winnipeg to Island Lake in December 1931, the plane ran into bad weather and made an emergency landing on Charron Lake. The ice was still soft and the plane began to sink immediately.

The pilots survived, but the whereabouts of the wreckage remained a mystery. Even using the most sophisticated technology available, the plane eluded nine search teams over 30 years.

A crucial break helped the museum locate the plane in Charron Lake, near the Ontario border, last July: The grandson of the fur trapper who found the stranded pilots came forward with new information he had received when he was a child.

A search team from the museum located the plane in Charron Lake, near the Ontario border, last July.