(FORTUNE Magazine) – It's salvage time for David Packard. The Hewlett-Packard co-founder and chairman not only is taking a more active role at the company (yearly profits are down 11%) but also is trying to raise something besides earnings. His sights are on four 1930s-vintage Navy biplanes sitting inconveniently under 1,500 feet of Pacific Ocean off the California coast. The Sparrowhawks got there when the dirigible U.S.S. Macon crashed in 1935 with the planes aboard. Packard recalls that as a Stanford undergraduate, he ''used to lie on the fraternity's roof to watch'' the Macon's sister ship, the U.S.S. Akron, fly over. Packard, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute that he funds, the U.S. Navy, and a group of aviation buffs wanted to see those big balloons again. Commissioned as sea scouts with a cruising range of 6,800 miles, the dirigibles launched the biplanes from internal hangars to sweep an enormous stretch of ocean looking for enemy fleets in the days before radar was common. Last year a search ship, stuffed with HP electronic gear, went looking for the Macon (the Akron went down in the Atlantic Ocean in 1933) and turned up a tennis shoe -- literally. Then searchers located a retired fisherman who had snagged pieces of the airship in his traps and pointed them to its site. Saltwater has destroyed most of the dirigible, but the planes are intact on the ocean floor, their hangar having dissolved around them. The group will try to raise them sometime this spring. But don't expect Packard, 78, to don a wet suit. If he wants to watch the recovery, he can just look out the window of his seaside home, which, by coincidence, is within viewing distance of the Macon's underwater mooring.