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[Ric Gillespie]

Still, if Ballard was only focused on aluminum and the engines did he miss any other items?

I think Ballard did a good job finding what was there (including a ball cap, wine bottle, and the sonar fish we lost in 1991) - except for the shallow areas in close to the reef edge.  We know there is at least one suspicious artifact there - the "embedded object" we tried to recover but couldn't relocate. Ballard didn't see it. Scattered pieces, including engine parts, embedded or grown-over with coral within about 100 feet of the reef edge are, IMO, all that is left of NR16020.

[Don Yee]

I'm curious to know what materials are and are not likely to be encrusted by coral. As an animal I'm sure that coral are choosy about what they will grow on (what ever the Ballard object is coral didn't seem to grow on it). The question could be are there any of those materials likely to be part of the Electra. I agree that a lot of the plane may have been encrusted to the point where it is no longer recognizable as a man-made object, but is that true for everything on the plane?

Don...

[Ric Gillespie]

Coral growth needs sunlight.  Below about 200 meters there is no significant sunlight.  If the aircraft or aircraft wreckage is deeper than 200 meters it should be coral-free and relatively easy to detect.
Ballard did not see any airplane wreckage so either all of the surviving wreckage is shallower than 200 meters and buried in coral, or in deeper water than anywhere he looked.