What forces of fate allow thousands of people to cross thesame terrain without seeing the crashed airplane that John Weisheitdiscovered on May 20th? And what does his find tell us about the still-missingBoeing 777 that disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March2014? Stay with me because I believe these two stories are related.
River guide and Colorado River advocate John Weisheit washiking in the Grand Canyon National Park with several others last week when thegroup came across the wreckage of a plane wedged between two boulders. Theaircraft was "smashed, so compressed that it was really hard to find anactual skeleton," Weisheit told the Associated Press, because seeing somethinglike that really does beg the question, "Is anybody inside?" The answer was yes.
"We did notice vertebrae in the cockpit."
If it is the airplane officials think it is, a homebuilt RV6experimental aircraft, then the remains of the sole occupant in the wreckageshould be the plane's owner, Joseph Radford, of Glendale, Arizona who took offfrom Grand Canyon National Park Airport on March 11, 2011 and was never seenagain.
Without plane or pilot theNational Transportation Safety Board was unable to conclude much more than thatthe airplane was missing and so three and a half years ago it concluded "the cause of the crash is unknown." Though in interviews the NTSB did learn that the pilot told hisgirlfriend he was going to use the plane to commit suicide.
In the weeks that followed Radford's disappearance, theNational Park Service and the Sheriff of Coconino County, flew a helicopter and a fixed wing airplane to search a 600 square mile area based on three pieces ofinformation; where an emergency locator was heard transmitting, radarinformation from the airport and location data drawn from Radford's cell phone.
The final search flight was a last ditch effort in which theCivil Air Patrol participated with some fancy new technology. To the undersideof the Cessna 182's wing, a Surrogate Predator sensor ball was attached. Thishigh definition camera is normally used with unmanned aircraft. But even slungbelow the prop plane, the intent was the same, collect images of the fly overzones that could be reviewed and analyzed for clues. The video would allow thesearch flight to be repeated without limit. The imagery from the Surrogate Predator would be used "in acontinued effort to locate the missing plane," according to a press release from the U.S. Park Service.
Whether the video was useful isn't clear, but the image-gatheringtrip seems to have been the last aerial effort to find Radford. High technologymay be useful but it was the observant Weisheit and his companions who seem tohave solved the mystery.
So low-tech was their find, that it took Weisheit fourdays in the wilderness to find a park service ranger to whom he could reportthe discovery.
All of which brings me to the still missing flight of Malaysia370 and the just published story by Reuters journalists Swati Pandey and JaneWardell reporting a rising chorus of criticism of the Dutch company handlingthe search for the missing jet.
Within the small universe of companies that do underwatersearch and recovery of aircraft, a few are claiming publicly that inexperiencedpersonnel and inappropriate technology are being used by the Fugro NV, theDutch company with the multi-million dollar contract with Australia to find themissing plane. It could give a falsesense of completion, according to the chief executive of Williamson &Associates, an American underwater recovery company that bid, but did not get,the contract to search for the plane.
"I have serious concerns that the MH370 searchoperation may not be able to convincingly demonstrate that 100 percent seafloor coverage is being achieved," Mike Williamson told the reporters.
The Boeing 777 is a big airplane much bigger than Radford'stiny red homebuilt, which took 4 years to find amid the mountains, valleys andrivers of the vast Grand Canyon. And yet even the Grand Canyon pales in size comparedto the South Indian Ocean.
Describing to readers how rarely peopleappreciate the nature of the sea floor Alan Huffman of the International Business Times described, "miles offlaming rifts, weird pinnacles and gaping chasms that make the Grand Canyonlook like a gully."
People who know I am writing a book about the MH 370 to be published by Penguin Books in 2016, nearlyalways ask me this question, "Where is it?" And I also try to describe thechallenges of finding something so relatively small in so enormous and deep anddark an ocean as the one where Malaysia 370 now certainly resides.
Whether the Australians have hired the best search team forthe job, I cannot say. I have my ideas about what happened to the flight and I amwriting about some of the many other airliners lost without a trace sincecommercial air travel began 100 years ago.
The surprising find in the middle of John Weisheit's walk inthe wilderness is a reminder that over the years, many airplanes have been lost and left the world confounded. Sometimesthese planes are found. Not all of them, though and often not in the way we expect.