Who's the owner?

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Lucky13

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Aug 21, 2006
In my castle....
With all the aircrafts being found nowadays, I was wondering, let's say that I stumble across an intact and immaculate Ta-152, or Arado 234, besides showing of almost 70 years of dust of course, who is the owner, there's no land owner, would it be the country where it's found or the German Government, or can I take the aircraft home and store it in my garage?
Just wondering what's what when you find something like this...
 
Siegfried is the owner
 
It depends on what country you live in and what country you find it in.

If you find it in Russia, the Russians will want a lot of money to let it go. Same in the South pacific. It all depends on where you find your own bit of WWII history.

If you find it in an ocean, it is yours ... unless you live in the U.S.A. and it is a US Navy aircraft, in which case the Navy will claim it if you raise it. If you are a person from, say, Germany and you raise a US Navy plane, I suppose it is yours ... unless you fly it or bring it to the U.S.A., in which case the US Navy will claim it and may impound it ... and you'll never see it again except in a US Navy Museum.

Since I am not a citizen of any other country, I don't know who owns a plane found in the sea if you happen to live in, say, Canada, and find it in Canadian waters.

It can get complicated.

If you think THIS is bad, try finding gold from a sunken ship from under the ocean within sovreign territorial waters, which is where it is USUALLY found.
 
Not being a legal scholar by any stretch, but first, how did you find this "item" on land that nobody/entity has ownership of?? Second, even if you find it in the middle of the ocean and raise it, apparently the originating country can make claims on it. Ask the guys who recently discovered that shipwreck with all the gold coins on it. I don't recall the country (Spain or Portugal perhaps), but they sure as h#ll immediately claimed ownership and lawyered up in a hurry.
 
GregP is partially correct, in the case of U.S. Navy planes. If you find it, say in the Great Lakes, the U.S. Navy will allow you to recover it (at your expense) that when you have it aboard a barge they will step in and claim it as U.S. Navy property. You do, however, have the right to claim salvage rights, which will wind up in a U.S. Court, and the court will decide. Just to make your day, the U.S. Navy loses 50 percent of the time !

If the aircraft in question, regardless of what country it belongs to, has/had human remains on board, it's a war grave and cannot be disturbed. This is international law.

The South Pacific has a ton of warplanes in their jungles and lagoons. Each country down there realizes what a "gold mine" there is in salvageable WW-II aircraft, and it will cost you a mint to extract it. Remember what happened to the B-17 dubbed "The Swamp Ghost" ??? The government of Papua, New Guinea, determined that the salvage and recovery was illegal, and impounded the aircraft at Lae. All this, of course, after the B-17 was disassembled and flown to a barge by helo. Don't quote me on this but I believe the salvers "stole" the aircraft and got it back to the U.S. The government of New Guinea is suing.

Charles
 
Now I am told in Australia that the law goes a little like this, you find a buried aircraft in the outback and you dig down to it and open up the fuselage and write your name ,address and passport number etc in a part of the aircraft that is unremovable . Then you bury it again and you put a advertisement in a government gazette stating your claim to the machine and asking anyone else if they have a claim to it to tender their claim and the gps coordinates to you to establish the validity of their claim. I believe after a period of time it is all yours. Easier I think if the aircraft was abandoned at the end of ww2 for lend lease reasons as the government has abandoned the goods.
 
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