Eight retired A-7 Corsair attack planes and one T-2 trainer are at the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, where the state dropped them. Not crash sites. Not accidents. A sanctioned dumping operation in 1997 that transformed Cold War-era scrap metal into an artificial fish condo. According to the "Guidelines for Marine Artificial Reef Materials," a 2004 compilation document put together by the Gulf and Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commissions, retired aircraft are one of the more lasting, if not entirely well-recognized, methods of artificial reef development in the United States.
And old Navy planes that have been sunk off the coast of Florida are a textbook case of that strategy working nearly three decades later. After five years of being submerged in water, all those aircraft were still there, fulfilling the very purpose that they had been sunk for: providing barnacle habitat, housing groupers, and making the underwater activity for divers much more exciting than just a sandy floor beneath.
