In the mid-late 1970s, Florida sank an F-101, F-102, T-33 and Sikorsky off Bay County; the aircraft served as fishing and diving reefs for more than 10 years

In the mid-1970s, an Air Force F-101 Voodoo interceptor, a supersonic jet built to defend against Soviet bombers, was lowered off a barge into the Gulf of Mexico, about 60-70 feet down. The F-102 fighter, an Air Force T-33 trainer, and a Sikorsky helicopter were also in the suite. No ceremony, no environmental review board, only a barge, a crane, and the very American shrug.

This isn't folklore. These four aircraft were purposefully sunk in the Gulf in the "mid-late 1970s," as described in a 1997 report by the Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission on artificial reef materials, and served as fishing and diving reefs for a period of 10+ years. It's a strange origin story, featuring some of America's most sophisticated Cold War hardware, retired into the sea and left to look after snapper and grouper.

Why did Florida sink these jets in the first place?


The only way to grasp why anyone would think that it makes sense to sink a jet one weekend is to go back in time to the 1970s and '80s in Florida. According to a 1985 NOAA paper on “National Artificial Reef Plan,” compiled under a mandate from Congress's National Fishing Enhancement Act, there was no national strategy for artificial reefs in the United States until about a decade after the Bay County jets went into the Gulf. Before the development of this framework, the placement of the material was always given precedence over planning and research, which is evident from the guidelines regarding artificial reef materials issued by the Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission; it also states that the earlier efforts to build reefs in the US were conducted by recreational fishermen and divers, not by scientists.

There was no real science behind sending military surplus to the ocean. This plan was reasonably successful for the Bay County aircraft, likely in part because fighter aircraft, as a class, are dense, heavy, and designed to withstand punishment. However, it did not work out in the case of the infamous tire reef off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, during the 1970s, when around two million tires that were discarded with the best intentions floated away and are now being cleaned up to this day.

The DIY culture nobody talks about

Bay County's own artificial reef program, using whatever surplus material was on hand, has been running for approximately 70 years, decades longer than any single set of wrecks, including the four Bay County aircraft, has been tracked as reef habitat. The "10+ years" figure describes how long the F-101, F-102, T-33, and Sikorsky specifically were documented functioning as fishing and diving sites in the 1997 report; it isn't a claim about how long artificial reefs have existed in the county overall, which is a separate and much longer-running program. For most of that longer history, there was no regulation involved at all. The captains or the commercial fishermen would just sink any kind of "material of opportunity," including pieces of scrap steel, old cars, old boats, and keep the coordinates confidential from others to protect their own fishing grounds. The permitting process was only introduced much later by federal agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers and the Coast Guard.

It's a vastly different scenario from what goes on today, with one reefing project for a vessel taking years to obtain permits from the Navy, years to survey the corals to find the right locations, and years to review the structure to ensure that the vessel can be safely reattached to the coral reef. It was more of the 1970s version: infrastructure created by boat captains, rather than committees.

Would this have worked today?

Being structurally tough is a different quality from being environmentally safe to sink, and the two aren't in tension. Modern reef guidance systems need to be stripped of residual fuel, hydraulic fluid, and, in some cases, toxic elements in the instrument dials, all of which are found in military aircraft. Most of that protocol is preceded by the 1970s sinkings. The airframes' physical durability is what let them survive decades underwater once they were down there; it says nothing about whether the fluids and materials inside them were handled responsibly beforehand, which is the separate, real disposal problem modern protocols now address. It just happened to work out; fighter jets are extremely durable and not so easy to break. It may not be a clean conservation success story, nor an environmental disaster, but a Florida success story from the 1970s, which solved a disposal problem one barge trip at a time, and hoped the ocean would take care of the rest.