THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE (RIVERSIDE, CA.) June 23, 2001
Hunt turns high-tech
CRASH: A satellite and foliage-penetrating radar have found possible sites near Rialto.RICHARD BROOKS
The search for missing pilot Daniel Katz who disappeared June 3 over brushy foothills near Rialto now relies largely on a commercial space satellite and an experimental radar being developed for spy agencies, the military and industry.
"The brush is so dense that we can't see through it. And the ground troops can't penetrate it," San Bernardino County sheriff's search commander Lt. Mike Tuttle said Friday. "This is the first time we've used any of this gear. The probability of success: Who knows? It's not designed to do what we're using it for." On Friday, sheriff's helicopter crews inspected -- without success -- dozens of possible crash sites pinpointed by the:
* IKONOS photographic satellite that snapped the picture television viewers saw last April of a damaged Navy EP-3 spyplane sitting on Hainan Island in the South China Sea.
* GeoSAR foliage-penetrating radar that is being developed under the auspices of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, a Department of Defense and intelligence combat-support organization. "It has flown before, and they've done mapping missions with it," Tuttle said of the GeoSAR system aboard a Gulfstream 2 jet. "But this is the first application for what we're trying to use it for: looking for an aircraft under the brush conditions we have in our mountains."
How it started
The search area is an 11- by 10-mile box extending east from Lytle Creek and north of Rialto. The missing pilot is a 24-year-old former Israeli paratrooper who disappeared on a flight from Perris Airport in Riverside County to Brackett Airport in La Verne.
Air traffic controllers lost contact with his rented plane near Lytle Creek, officials say, on a day when low clouds apparently forced Katz to fly below the level of air traffic control radar. Controllers quickly radioed Katz, who said he was 18 miles east of Brackett. Katz was flying at an altitude of 2,900 feet. Nearby terrain rose to twice that height, carpeted with brush 10- to 12-feet tall, officials say.
A helicopter search found no trace of the cream-colored Piper Archer. As search commander -- and president of the National Association for Search and Rescue -- Tuttle was aware of a high-tech system capable of finding planes hidden beneath foliage. But that aircraft-based system belonged to NASA, and Tuttle was told it was temporarily unavailable.
NASA gets involved
"They started making phone calls in Washington to find other systems that could work," Tuttle said of NASA's help. "It snowballed." The newest data arrived Friday from a Colorado-based company that had scanned the search area with its IKONOS satellite.
"We analyzed the imagery ourselves to see if we saw an airplane, and we didn't," said Gary Napier of Space Imaging Inc. "But we saw quite a few shiny objects . . . that you don't want to ignore. Nature typically doesn't produce bright shiny objects." The company sent sheriff's officials a compact disc containing three digital images of the search area, a poster-sized composite of the three digital photos and closeups of the reflections, including the latitude and longitude of 16 possible crash sites.
Wha was missing?
All of that was being checked Friday. But the lingering question was what might the telescope-like satellite have missed? "It can't see through clouds," Napier said. "The other limitation is: We can't see through trees (or deep, dense brush). It's not radar." So sheriff's helicopter crews also rechecked 26 possible crash sites that the GeoSAR radar has spotted. Each of those targets originally was checked Thursday. Most turned out to be rock outcroppings, said Tuttle.
Even the project director downplayed the chance of success. "It's very dense brush and a very rocky area," said Thomas Carson, GeoSAR program manager at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. "So we're seeing a lot of (digital data) points that you could interpret as an airplane."
Other applications
The military has long been interested in foliage-penetration radar, said Dan Smith, chief of research for the Center for Defense Information. "The idea is to target vehicles that are sitting still and not necessarily emitting a heat signature that could be picked up by infra-red," Smith said. "To be able to dig into that kind of concealment would really give a commander a leg up."
But rather than being a tool for targeting individual tanks and missile launchers, GeoSAR is optimized for mapping vast distances, said Carson. GeoSAR's computers gobble up a gigabyte of information per second and can map 160 square kilometers -- 61.8 square miles -- a minute, he said. There's talk of using it to map a large portion of Alaska, Carson said.
Sharing technology
Scheduled to be operational in October 2002, GeoSAR would be operated by Fresno-based EarthData International Inc. It would be available to everyone from the California Department of Conservation to private companies like Redlands-based ESRI, and even to foreign governments.
"We have first use of the system," said Carson, of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. "In other words, we can redirect (the use) if we have an emergency."
From GeoSAR, Carson said, military commanders could help evaluate a particular area's suitability for everything from constructing airstrips to moving troops inland after an amphibious landing.
The National Imagery and Mapping Agency is best known for its work during the war in Kosovo, said John Pike, director of a space and intelligence policy group called GlobalSecurity.Org.
"They've had a couple of notable failures. The most recent one being the Chinese embassy bombing in the Kosovo war," said Pike. "But almost everything that went right in Kosovo (also) was due directly or indirectly to them. All the 'smart weapons' that were used . . . depended on NIMA for targeting information. The modern military could not operate without them."
Still looking
As for missing airplanes, the search commander is hoping this will be the start of a fruitful relationship between the Sheriff's Department and groups such as the ones it is working with in the search for Katz.
"Long term, there's always a chance that someone survives one of these crashes," Tuttle said. "Now we know the process to get assistance much quicker, and potentially save someone's life.
Copyright 2001 The Press Enterprise Co.
