Went Down Off Indonesia In 1938

The head of the giant consumer products maker SC Johnson Company embarked on a sentimental journey this week, as he traveled to the South Pacific to search the ocean for a plane his grandfather flew in 1935.

Fisk Johnson's grandfather flew the plane to Brazil that year, looking for a permanent supply of carnauba wax. H.F. Johnson Jr. completed the trip successfully, and later sold the Sikorsky S-38C seaplane to an oil company.

Three years later, however, the plane went down on takeoff along the coast of Indonesia... and that's where it has remained for nearly 50 years.

In 1998, Fisk Johnson, his brother and late father flew a replica of the plane to Brazil to re-enact the 1935 flight... but Fisk believes his father, who passed away in 2004, had always wanted to find the plane that HIS dad had flown.

"I think Dad wanted much more to find the plane (than build it)," Johnson told the Associated Press. "In many ways, it symbolized who his father was to him."

Recent underwater photos taken off the Indonesian coast show wreckage that could be an aircraft... and that is where Fisk and several family members will begin diving this weekend.

FMI: www.scjohnson.com/family/fam_our_sam.asp