Day four of the search for two missing men continues after their plane mysteriously disappeared from radar signals approximately 60 kilometres north of Sault Ste. Marie last Thursday.
In cases like these, where planes and other aircraft are involved, the Royal Canadian Air Force primarily takes the lead as it has the mandate for aeronautical search and rescue.
Major Trevor Reid, the Senior Public Affairs Officer with the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre out of Trenton, says the seven aircraft involved in the mission have been doing visual searches both day and night to look for evidence of aircraft on the ground.
For search and rescue involving missing aircraft, the team first goes through an “uncertainty phase,” which can be declared when radio contact has been lost with an aircraft and can't be re-established, or when an aircraft fails to arrive at its destination, which happened in this case. The flight information centre reported this particular plane was overdue at its destination in Marathon and had not arrived on Thursday evening.
“Unfortunately, we were not able to establish communication with the two persons on board,” Reid says.
From there, the team tries to gain more certainty on the situation and to look for evidence of where the plane may be or if the distress signal had been activated. If these aren’t found, the team then goes into the “stress base,” where they have reasonable certainty to believe the aircraft is indeed in distress and the search is activated using air resources.
Reid says the search isn’t getting any easier as the forecast is showing snow showers this afternoon and throughout the week.
“Weather conditions are beginning to become less favourable,” Reid says. “But we do have some helicopters and aircraft engaged on the search. Once again, they’re concentrating around the area where the plane was last spotted on radar. We also have aircraft following the flight plan between Delhi and Marathon.”
The conditions are already challenging to manage without the snow showers, as the ground terrain is very hilly with lots of snow and trees in some areas.
“The area is difficult to quantify, but for a search like this, it often results in multiple passes over multiple locations at different altitudes. When we’re dealing with hills it creates a bit of 3-D search effect.”
While the chances of finding both men alive may be looking dire, Reid says the search is still a rescue mission and not a recovery, noting each moment is a precious one.
“We take our mission minute by minute, hour by hour,” Reid says. “We don’t want to look ahead. Our focus is on the here and the now in finding them.”
The Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Trenton is staffed by both air force members for aeronautical cases and Canadian Coast Guard members for marine cases. Reid said electronic searches are also being conducted to try to pick up an emergency locator transmitter that the missing plane had onboard. The search aircraft are equipped with devices that can pick up and hone emergency locator signals.
Those signals are yet to be identified.
Reid pointed out there could be several reasons why search and rescue teams haven’t managed to pick up a signal from either the plane or one of the missing individuals’ cellular devices, but he doesn’t want to speculate into why that’s happening at this time.
Reid says the team continues to focus resources in the search area, as well as other tracks along the men’s presumed flight path to Marathon, adding there isn’t a timeframe for the rescue.
“It would be disingenuous to suggest that there is a time on that tour or something like that,” he explained. “At the moment, we are constantly analyzing the situation and assigning resources as may be needed.”
– with files from Denise Paglinawan
