Hi Tankie,
>is it ethical or unethical. I cant make my mind up,
From a recent article in Flugzeug Classic, it appears that there can hardly be a legal way to approach a WW2 aircraft crash site with intentions of uncovering something unless you have prior permission by the authorities.
Assessing the danger, I believe it grows worse the older the site is. Disturbing a WW2 wreck that is the grave of an aircrew is improper, but our knowledge of WW2 history won't suffer much. However, older modern, medieval or even pre-historic artifacts still preserved in the soil are much more important to our understanding of the past, and that's where the "bad" metal detector guys do an incredible amount of damage today. Grave robbers destroyed the entire background knowledge about the Nebra Sky Disk for example by just looting the site and leaving no records, where proper aercheologists would have needed to record the lay of every fine variation in the soil covering the site to learn infinetely more about the age and the context than it was possible to learn from the made-up descriptions of the arrested diggers.
To modern archeologists, even the work of their early antecessors appears coarse and destructive though they were true scientist and strived for the best possible results - they are desperate when they think about modern metal-detector armed amateurs who destroy the most valuable aspect in the process of retrieving the metal artifacts that are only the core of the find. And there is an army of amateurs out there, augmented by quite a number of professional looters ... this has evolved into a major problem for science.
To cheer you up, there have been some positive reports on knowledgable and honest metal detector hobbyists too, who really did science great services by leaving their find undisturbed and quietly alerting the authorities to secure the site. It's perhaps not by coincedence that these reports (as I dimly recall) were from Britain! There seems to be a lot of respect for the national heritage in your country, and it's really great to see that in such a sensitive issue as metal detectors, there are enthusiasts for whom it's a question of honour to protect rather than to destroy!
Regards,
Henning (HoHun)