All across America and around the world, this is Veterans Radio.
And welcome to Veterans Radio.
I am Jim Fossone with veteransradio.net.
We are recording today from the Legal Help for Veterans Studio in Northville, Michigan.
Legal Help for Veterans is a Veterans Disability Law Firm.
You can reach us at 800-693-4800.
We want to welcome to Veterans Radio today, Tarris Lisenko, an Army veteran who, with
his colleague Alan Olson, are the founders and owners of ANT Recovery, which is involved
in a fascinating slice of military history.
Tarris, welcome to Veterans Radio.
Thank you for having me.
Well, let's start because you both are Army veterans.
Why don't we start there and then we'll come back around to how you got yourself involved
in this interesting endeavor.
So tell us about your military experience.
Well, mine, I'm a commissioned officer, branched infantry, Ranger Qualified.
And that's, it was a fun part of my life, interesting part of my life.
And in the 80s under Ronald Reagan, so it was, I called him the great commander.
I don't know what other people called him, but that's what I called him.
Al is considerably older to me.
He is actually considered Vietnam era, but he didn't participate in Vietnam.
And he worked on, I think it was Pershing Missiles in Germany.
It was maintenance on Pershing Missiles in Germany.
So that's pretty much it.
That's a great experience for what you were doing at A&T Recovery.
Not really.
It has nothing to do with what you do at A&T Recovery.
So let's talk about how a couple of Chicago boys dreamed up the idea about A&T Recovery.
We are, you just used the term boys, and I try to get this across to people to always
see the world through the eyes of a child.
Sometimes they say the eyes of a puppy.
If you notice puppies and children, they have this great sense of wonder about everything
they see.
And the trouble is we become adults and we lose that sense of wonder.
And we get into this routine of just going to work nine to five for 40 years and planning
for retirement.
And that is something we never, ever, ever thought about.
And there was a philosopher named Alan Watts, and I never heard of him until recently, but
he did this wonderful thing, what do you desire?
Alan Watts, what do you desire?
And he said, we have it all wrong.
And I think Alan and I and the rest of our crew all along knew that we all had it wrong.
And what we should do as humans, we should not just exist, we should really live.
And the way to live is to do what you desire.
And so we have always sort of looked at the world like through the eyes of a child, just
looking for wonder, what's around the rock, what's under the rock, under that rock, what's
around the side of that mountain.
We've always explored no matter where we are.
You can drop us in any part of the planet and we'll start exploring almost instantly.
There was a comic strip years ago, Calvin and Hobbes, where I give students when I give
a presentation, I give them a copy of the one where he's digging in the ground and his
stuffed tiger says to him, why are you digging that hole in the ground?
He said, I'm hunting for treasure.
And the tiger asked, have you found anything?
And he says, a bunch of disgusting grubs, these worms, these rocks, there's treasure everywhere.
And that's kind of how we look at things.
We just know there's some sort of interesting something you can call a treasure or whatever
you want to call it, but there's something everywhere to be seen and discovered.
Well what you were discovering, and again this started when you guys were just young
men, was this idea that there were World War II aircraft that had crashed in Lake Michigan
off of the Chicago area because of the training that was done outside Chicago to make folks
aircraft carrier qualified.
So tell us a little bit about kind of how that pecued your interest.
Well so this is before we did college and military, before we did that, and we were
teenagers, at least I was a teenager.
Actually I kept correct that Al actually had done that stuff and I was still a teenager.
And so we were scuba divers from early on, young ages, we became scuba divers.
And just so you know, we went to the same grade school, the same high school.
I kind of think so.
I've known Al since I was three years old when I moved on to the street where he was
already living on with his family.
But we actually were scuba divers and Al had this idea of buying this boat that was pretty
bad.
I swear it was literally held together with duct tape.
And so we went out of the lake, we knew about the ships.
We knew Chicago had been one of the busiest ports in the 1800s so we were looking for
ships and a scuba group located a TBF Avenger, Torpedo Bomber Avenger type, the type that
George Bush Sr. would have flown in the war.
And so that's when we found out about the aircraft.
So we shifted our attention and it didn't take us long.
It was less than a year.
Al and I located a Wildcat fighter.
So we actually turned that over to a private salvage company and they actually salvaged
it for a guy named Kellege who owns those, I think it's 57 Aerosquadron restaurants
and he made a deal with the Navy that he could have it or whatever.
I don't know exactly the details because I was young and flippant.
I was still a teenager.
And so anyway, I'm college, military and came back and I said, you know, we should turn
this looking for the aircraft into a business.
And I had money, he had money and we bought a much better boat.
And we bought the equipment needed, which was called Side Scan Sowner, to actually find
the aircraft.
And boy did we find aircraft.
It's really, it's really amazing how many you've found and we're going to talk about
those and these are all in a book that Tarris has written called The Great Navy Birds of
Lake Michigan.
Yes, thank you for the pitch of the book.
Oh no, it's a capture in the true story of the privateers of Lake Michigan and the aircraft
they rescued.
Well, you rescued over 40 or so aircraft from Lake Michigan and elsewhere, but this isn't
an easy couple of things here.
This isn't, they're not easy to find.
And then you get into this whole issue of who really owns them.
Let's start with, these aren't easy to find, are they?
They're not easy to find.
And it's all about logistics.
And one thing, I'm the gregarious public face of ANT recovery, but L is the electronic
how you put the vessel and the equipment together to do it expert.
I would say he's a genius with electronics.
It's amazing.
And then together with our other crew members, Keith Pearson and Paul and Bruce and a number
of others, they're able to fabricate anything needed on the fly.
And when we're operating, we're army, we mentality, we get into trouble, something goes wrong,
we don't quit.
We figure out how to fix it.
There's always another way up that hill, isn't there?
You might be digging under it, right?
It might be tunneling.
In reading the book, one of the interesting things is you do hit, okay, you found it.
Okay, side scan radar helped you out, the ship logs probably didn't help you out.
Where exactly it crashed, nobody GPS'd it at the time, there's no black box that's working
for you.
All of that, you find it.
We still find it.
Now you have to pick it up off the ground.
Yeah, pick it out under the link bottom.
Not an easy task, is it?
No, and it's not an easy task because of our wonderful, and I don't want to complain at
all, but our government has too many tentacles interfering with too much stuff where they
shouldn't, and they should sometimes just sit back and let us do what we do.
Every bureaucrat needs to put their stamp of approval on it.
I say my book is really, the title is misleading.
It's not really so much in my mind about the aircraft, it's about American humanities.
It's an actual micro study of, well, my observation, my personal view of how our government doesn't
really help us, help ourselves, it doesn't let us help ourselves.
So the aircraft are owned by the US Navy, alright, and they're for the American population.
And the reason for that is, I use an example, I say if you're walking through a parking
lot of a grocery store and you dropped your wallet and someone else finds it, it's not
their wallet, it's still your wallet, right?
You lost it.
Same thing applies to the aircraft, the US government lost the aircraft in Lake Michigan,
and so you have to go to the US government and say, specifically the Navy, and say we'd
like to do something with this, and they have to grant you permission.
They can either divest themselves of ownership.
Now, for years, we've had this thing called amity law, the laws of fines and the laws
of salvage, which says, doesn't say you own it because you found it underwater, it says
the owner should compensate you for helping what's been lost, return what's lost.
So we actually were able to work with the National Naval Aviation Museum, I think I
said that right, National Naval Aviation Museum, director and deputy director.
In those days, it was Captain Robert Rasmussen and Buddy Macon, that was the director and
the deputy director, and they found a way for us to work with the US Navy to recover
those 40 or so aircraft, and because of their determination, as well as ours, we were able
to get all those aircraft recovered, restored, on display at almost two dozen prestigious
museums across the country, including their museum, the National Museum of the United
States Marine Corps, the National Museum of the Pacific War, Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum,
Kalamazoo Aviation History Museum, we also noticed that Kalamazoo Air Zoo, cradle of
aviation, Long Island, New York, the aircraft carriers, Yorktown, Lexington, Midway.
So additionally, some of the aircrafts worked because they understood this, that the population
needs better chances to see them.
A number of the aircraft, we were allowed to, they exchanged them for us in a sense of payment
and to other people for things, and they've been returned to the public, and there's
aircraft that have come out of Lake Michigan that were restored to flying position, and
they're seen at air shows across the country every year.
Well, it's really amazing the book talks about how, well, it's the government's aircraft
still, we're spending all the effort and time in raising this, but we can't get paid for
it, we've got to get something in that's traded like bartering exchange for it.
It isn't a finder's keepers, it's really, you might be lucky enough to get a reward.
Yeah, yeah, and they don't make it easy.
They really don't make it easy.
They, there's, it's amazing all the entire permitting process, there was a Navy lawyer
that said, well, we think the permitting process takes about a year, and it's, aside from
CNY, you know, the people didn't not understanding how to find them.
When you look at the average person doesn't have all the expertise to find them, and then
to go through the government stuff, and that's why we were able to put together a team that
could figure out how to do all that.
And then when they, they, the Navy stopped using that exchange thing and shut off the
exchange thing, we had to go raise private money.
And it's very interesting, the private money that came into, to support the recovery restoration
and public display of these aircraft.
Enterprise Renekar, well, Enterprise Holdings, which owns Renekar, Enterprise Renekar, CEO
and son of founder, a lot of people don't know.
Enterprise was, was named after the Enterprise aircraft carrier because the founder, Jack
Taylor was a Hellcat pilot aboard the USS Enterprise during World War II.
So in honor of, of his father and that ship and the men, his son, Andy Taylor, sponsored
the recovery and restoration of a Hellcat fighter.
McDonald's Corporation, which was under, at the time was under direction of a man named
Fred Turner, who I think was the second CEO after Ray Kroc, back at least three of the,
the recovery restoration display projects.
And that's an interesting story.
And then there's other people such as a guy, a man named Chuck Greenhill, who sponsored
two of the recoveries and restorations.
So, so we have a, so, so, and the Navy can't help us do that.
The Navy can't help us raise money to do this stuff.
We have to go do it.
I want to go back to the challenge of actually lifting these airframes, which have been sitting
on the bottom in like Michigan, at least it's freshwater, but you've also had recoveries
elsewhere sitting on the bottom, 150 feet or 100 feet below the surface or all kinds
of,
How about 400?
Oh, I, okay.
I mean, we, those of us who's, who's ever scuba dive knows that, you know, the pressure is
building, building, building.
This is a logistical challenge and different each and every time I suspect.
Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Well, all the aircraft, Navy aircrafts were more towards designed to be lifted.
And you, you, you understand that because say an aircraft carrier pulls into port, it,
it might have aircraft that are damaged beyond what the aircraft carrier has capabilities
to repair.
So it's got to be lifted off the ship onto the dock and taken to repair facilities.
So they're all designed to be that way, except for the design works if the aircraft is standing
on its wheels the way it's, it's built, right?
The design doesn't work if it's flipped over, twisted on the side, half upside down.
So they could be in any position because when they crash into water, the, they, they, they
don't just, they don't just gently flutter to the bottom, they flip and spin and twist
and right because they have control surfaces, which might be called the air surfaces or
whatever.
So we never know exactly how the aircraft is going to be.
So we, so say we have an aircraft that's 300 feet deep, we have to, we have to, we videotape
it with what's called remote, remote operated vehicles, ROVs, what they call them.
It's an underwater robot is what it is that we control from the surface and it's got a
nice camera and it has what we call manipulators, which are mechanical hands or arms, which
could be anything you could be kicking, caught, it can grab, it can attach things.
My joke always is cause we, we tease each other about operating, operating, operating
those things.
And my joke is we need to, we need to hire some 14 year old video game players because
they have the skill set.
Yes.
Absolutely.
Anyway, it's a very lengthy, tedious thing, but, but as I said before, you know, Al, Keith,
Paul, Bruce, it can fabricate just about anything we need.
So no matter how the aircraft is resting on the bottom, they can figure out how to pick
it up generally.
They can figure it.
And we have all the engineer drawings of the aircraft and what's called the erection
maintenance manuals where we know how to disassemble and assemble and we have guys like Pete and
Ty who are A&P mechanics or even aircraft inspectors that just can look at that stuff
and tell us, you know, hey, you need this here and you need that there.
So we put together an absolutely unbelievable team that does this really well.
We have Todd who's just great with logistics and, and you, and one of, it's one of those
things, you know, the stars line up, our team lines up because they just whatever, whatever
weaknesses one has, one of the other ones makes up for it.
And well, it's the kind, it's the kind of project where you never know what you're
going to walk into.
So having that kind of team is important.
And we're talking to Tarris Lascensko, who is the one of the founders and the author
of a new book called The Great Navy Birds of Lake Michigan put out by the America through
time, which is an imprint of Font Hill Media LLC.
The pictures in this, Tarris are amazing and, and worth the book right there.
The, I think you really tell the story through the pictures of the airplanes that you find
both on the bottom and as you bring them up to the surface, they're in all kinds of
different conditions, aren't they?
Oh yeah.
The one thing about it, nice thing about it in general, the crashes were, you would
call them a ditching because they were either generally on takeoff or on landing to the,
the makeshift aircraft carriers.
So there's not, they're not like combat crashes where, you know, they were fighting a Japanese
zero and the pilot got hit by a round and killed.
So the aircraft went into the, into the water at 300 miles an hour.
They generally were at close to stall, very close to stall speed, which, and I don't think
you want me to get into all the pilot stuff, but basically the stall speed, landing speed,
takeoff speed, right?
They were just, just, just at that point.
So generally the damage isn't too bad.
Now you see some of them that actually impacted the water wrong and the, the wings are the
front end edges of the wings are folded back and that kind of stuff and pilots, if any actioners
reports the pilots would hit their faces on the instrument panels and fracture or skulls
sometimes and, but, but in general that's pretty good.
But there are ones where they lost their engine power on takeoff and crash right front of
the ship and the ship hit them.
And so, you know, they are, that aircraft is going to have a lot of gammon.
Interesting thing, we've recovered at least two aircraft and I know that that happened
in both pilots survived.
And I talk about having nine lives.
I just, those pilots used a few of them and in those instances, but you look at the aircraft
and they're heavily damaged by the ship.
And does any, anybody who's ever been in the service knows and our veteran radio listeners
would know training accidents, training in the military is a serious, dangerous business
and this just sort of highlights all that.
But I want to swing a little bit from the recovery to the restoration.
It's one thing to pull these things out of the water and just let all the mud in the
goop and drain out of them.
But almost all of them then get restored and that's got to take years and dollars.
Who does the restoration?
I've got to say ANT Recovery doesn't do restoration.
It is a tedious artisan work and our hats off to these restores and most of them are
volunteers.
And the sad thing is most of them are in their 80s and 90s are generally retired people
that have done something else and they're brilliant.
And if I think we look at it, we look at something and say, oh my God, they look at it and say,
oh, that's a wonderful challenge.
Yes, they take years.
And for many years, the main restoration of these aircraft was being done at the National
Naval Aviation Museum until the Naval History and Heritage Command shut down their restoration
facilities and I won't go into that.
But if you read the book, you see what they did.
And but we were fortunate.
The Kalamazoo Aviation History Museum or the Air Zoo stepped up to expand their restoration
facilities.
So if you're anywhere in Michigan or the Midwest, it's a great thing to go.
They allow actually the public to participate in restoration, which is really interesting.
We began a project by requesting of Dick and Betsy DeVos, our present education secretary,
that they have a charter school called the West Michigan Aviation Academy.
We made a request to them that they bring their students to become involved in the restoration
of some of these aircraft and they responded to that right away and favorably.
And so we began with the West Michigan Aviation Academy students back by 2013 or 2014.
And since then, the schools all across the region, I would call it the South Central
Michigan region, all the way as far as Chicago, the Chicago has high school military academies,
their students come and work on them.
So it's middle school students all the way through university level students and then
lots of members of the public participate in the restoration of these aircraft now.
Well, and as you said earlier, these aircraft once restored have ended up all over the country
as far away as Pearl Harbor and San Diego at different museums, the National World War
II Museum.
So somebody's doing a whole lot of restoration work to keep this history alive, which is what
you're really bringing to the table, isn't it?
Bringing history alive.
Yes, that's, I talked about the naval history in heritage command, part of their mission
is to make naval history come alive.
Well, I would argue that they're not doing it, but we are.
So all of us from the National Naval Aviation Museum, the Air Zoo, all these other museums,
all these restores, it takes thousands of people to participate to make this work.
And so it's thousands of people doing what their mission is.
Well, you're out, you're out talking to different groups.
I know you're coming to the Yankee Air Museum in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and they're working
on a plane restoration for their museum.
It's really that hands on that I suspect you find motivates people to be involved in this
work.
You know, people like the real thing.
If Shoma photograph of an aircraft or Shoma video, so what?
But if they can go and actually see machines built by the men and women of the greatest
generation that were used to protect the world's liberty and freedom, that's what they want
to see.
And that's where they learn.
And they can, in the Midway airports, the Chicago airports, Chicago, O'Hare and Midway,
those are the most viewed naval artifacts in all the Navy's collection.
And millions of people a year stop and press the little buttons or read the plaques that
just tell them about things such as butchow hair and in the battle of Midway.
And they see the two aircraft recovered from Lake Michigan.
And so every year, just those two aircraft educate millions of people because most of
our society has forgotten all that.
They've forgotten that the greatest generation protected us.
Well, and that's why we like telling these stories on Veterans Radio because so many
people would never have really connected the dots about the training out of Great Lakes,
the birds that crashed into Lake Michigan.
And we're talking to Teras Lysenko, founder of ANT Restoration.
He's recently written a book called The Great Navy Birds of Lake Michigan.
And Teras, if folks want to find out maybe where you're speaking next or where the next
plane is going to, is there some way that they can stay in touch with you and know what's
going on in this area?
There are author's pages, but those are hard.
We do, I do a lot of posting on Facebook, LinkedIn.
It's really easy to connect up or follow me on any one of those things.
Whether or not my email is all over the internet, my phone number's all over the internet.
So I actually say more importantly than following me is if people know an organization that
would like a talk, I do lots of them.
I think over the past 30 years, I've done a thousand.
And I do them all the time.
I have yet to say no to any group.
I've given presentations to a small number, six, and as many as several thousand.
And so it's really easy if they know how to spell my name.
They just put that into Google and it's really easy.
They can contact me through any number of ways.
My email address, my phone number, Facebook, LinkedIn.
There's an interesting story in the book about the use of LinkedIn.
I don't know if you were able to see it, but it's a heart-wrenching story.
But I recommend people read it because it talks about even though we win in a war, there's
a lot of pain for even the winners.
Oh, absolutely.
Let me help our listeners out.
It's Taurus T-A-R-A-S, L-S-I-N-C-O, L-Y-S-S-E-N-K-O.
And I hope they reach out and follow you on Facebook and LinkedIn and sort of stay in touch
with what you do.
And we really appreciate you taking some time to talk to us here today on Veterans Radio.
Well, thank you for the opportunity and keep up the good work.
And I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio today.
I am Jim Fawcone.
It's been a pleasure to be your host.
I'm a Veterans Disability lawyer at Legal Help for Veterans and you can reach us at
800-69-348-00 or legalhelpforveterans.com on the web.
You can follow Veterans Radio on Facebook and listen to its podcasts and internet radio
shows by going to veteransradio.net.
And until next time, you are dismissed.
If you have a VA claim denied by the Board of Veterans Appeals, contact Legal Help for
Veterans at 1-800-693-4800.
They're experts in handling cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims.
Their number again, 1-800-693-4800.
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