Wonderful site!
" On that fateful day in December 1941, the Japanese weren't the only ones flying over Pearl Harbor. In fact, more than 70 American aircraft were airborne during the Japanese attack. A dozen U.S. planes were shot down, including two by friendly ground fire. But because of the day's chaos, the aerial combat losses of December 7 were never fully accounted for. The crashes were unwitnessed and unrecoverable because SCUBA gear had not yet been invented.
Five planes carrying nine crewmen are still missing in Hawaiian waters. Five were USS Enterprise crewmen, three were coast artillery enlisted men, and one was a USAAF pilot: Gordon Sterling - the sole U.S. Army Air Force pilot still counted as missing. He was in the first American air combat with the mysterious Zero fighter, and he paid the ultimate price. His P-36 crashed off Oahu's east coast."
Flight Journal Magazine has an extensive online library of articles. The excerpt above, Pearl Harbor's Lost P-36 - Still Missing After 60 Years by 2LT Gordon Sterling is just one example. To read the entire artcile, please go to:
http://www.flightjournal.com/fj/articles/lost_p-36/
Much Thanks to David Aiken from Pearl Harbor History Associates - http://pearlharbor-history.org/