Crews looking for two young adults who went missing while flying between Cranbrook and Kamloops are still hopeful they will find the pair alive.
“I take it as a rescue operation until we find that plane and can ascertain what is going on,” Lt. Col. Bryn Elliott with the Royal Canadian Air Force said.
Alex Simons and Sydney Robillard, both 21, were flying from Lethbridge last Thursday bound for Kamloops. The pair stopped in Cranbrook to re-fuel but fell off the radar after that.
Simons was piloting the single-engine Piper Warrior aircraft.
Thunderstorms rolled through the area shortly after the pair left Cranbrook but it’s not known if and how the weather may have played a factor in the plane’s disappearance.
“We can imagine he did see the weather when he was trying to get to 10,500 feet so that leads to did he turn back to track? Did he go somewhere else?” Eliott said. “He did have full gas so the radius that he could have gone is quite amazing.”
The search involves six military aircraft including three Buffalo planes, two Cormorant helicopters and one Griffon helicopter as well as about 100 military personnel. Nearly a dozen private planes are also involved as well as dozens of civilians acting as spotters from the air.
On Monday, some of the search crews were following up on what could be a lead, a beacon signal that was picked up within the search area.
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“The problem with it is it has been very intermittent and our direction finding equipment has not really been able to point a great direction where this is coming from,” Elliott said. “So the Aurora last night pin pointed four times where it picked it up but they were different areas and wasn’t able to give us a direction.”
While it’s very hard to say if the signal is from the missing plane, search crews are leaving no stones unturned.
“We sent out a Buffalo and Cormorant helicopter out to these areas to go scour them as well as they can,” Elliott said. “They are at lower altitude today, so 500 feet and contouring all the mountains that are in the areas where we got these indications”
Crews were hoping to have about 40 per cent of the area thoroughly searched by the end of Monday.
Simons obtained his pilot’s licence in March, 2017.
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