The Press-Enterprise November 09, 2008
High-tech searches for plane crashes prove least reliable
By Richard Brooks
Seven years after a space satellite and two experimental radar systems gave up the hunt, sunlight glinting off aircraft wreckage caught the eye of a sheriff's helicopter pilot and solved the disappearance of ex-Israeli paratrooper David Katz, who crashed near Cajon Pass.
And a year after another exhaustive search -- involving satellite imagery and infrared devices -- failed to find millionaire-adventurer Steve Fossett, a hiker stumbled across Fossett's ID cards and pullover jacket, leading to the victim's remains and burned-out airplane near Mammoth Lakes.
The lesson, say experts ranging from the search leaders to NASA contractors, is that high technology isn't ready for prime time when it comes to finding mountain plane-crash sites fast enough to help survivors.
So searchers continue to rely on two old stand-bys:
Air Traffic Control radar data, which can identify the general area where a plane crashed.
Each plane's crash-activated radio beacon, if it survives the impact and possible fire, which can guide searchers to the wreckage, sometimes with the help of satellites that orbit the globe listening for such signals.
"We're relying on our traditional techniques," said Matt Scharper, search-and-rescue coordinator for the California Office of Emergency Services. "If technology is available, we'll deploy that as well. But we don't put all our hopes on it."
Even the most ardent supporters of high technology agree it's not a panacea.
"Commercial satellite imagery seldom finds the plane or the (missing) child," said Mark E. Brender, vice president of communication and marketing for GeoEye, owners of the IKONOS photographic satellite that looked for both Katz and Fossett. "But it gives you an accurate image of the ground. And you can say, (a survivor) 'could have walked down this path,' or 'here's where we could land a helicopter.' "
IKONOS helped searchers find pieces of the space shuttle Columbia after it disintegrated over east Texas in February 2003.
But in most small-plane crashes, the goal is to find survivors. And so far, that's a job done most successfully by searchers on the ground or flying at low altitude.
The Problem
"These aircraft are just a couple of thousands pounds of metal," technology expert John Pike, of GlobalSecurity.org, says of the fundamental stumbling block. "If you're looking for a jumble of ... debris against a rough background, you're just not going to see it."
Katz's four-seat Piper Seneca II remained largely intact when it crashed in June 2001 into a steep mountainside overlooking Lytle Creek. But it came to rest beneath a tree. And the tan wreckage closely matched the color of the terrain.
Fossett's two-seat Super Decathlon burned, incinerating its fabric skin, leaving behind little more than a frame.
So neither plane could be spotted easily. Their crash beacons, or the antennas, apparently were destroyed.
Pike and other experts say it's impractical to employ state-of-the-art photo satellites and foliage-penetrating radar in the search for every missing plane.
"With Fossett, they mounted a pretty good-sized effort. Most people aren't worth that much money," Pike said. "I would look for the development of more rugged (crash-activated) beacons."
The Katz Search
Initially, it seemed that it would be comparatively easy to find Katz, who disappeared on a return flight to Brackett Airport in La Verne from Perris in Riverside County, where low clouds had scuttled a planned skydiving trip.
Air traffic control radar tracked him to the mouth of Lytle Creek, just north of Fontana and Rialto.
But when searchers swarmed the area, they couldn't find wreckage or signals from the emergency locator transmitter.
"If we want to find a person quickly, the radar track and the ELT are the best resources," said Civil Air Patrol Major Bob Keilholtz, who was in charge of the Air Patrol's search for Fossett and helped hunt for Katz. "The human eye is the next best. And then we ramp up these other (high-tech) resources."
Search teams on foot, horseback and ATVs came up empty. Civil Air Patrol and San Bernardino County sheriff's pilots searched the foothills from the Cajon Pass to the Los Angeles County border and found nothing.
The IKONOS photo satellite and two foliage-penetrating radar systems -- one in a Gulfstream II business jet and the other in a NASA DC-8 jetliner -- searched the region.
Nobody knew exactly where to look. But each system found targets. Dozens and dozens of them.
"I worked with NASA," said John Amrhein, a sheriff's emergency services coordinator. "They would fly the area, do their scan, and then ... send us back some locations to look at."
Potential targets were anything that a computer analysis of the radar data suggested might be man-made items.
Searchers found everything from water tanks to wreckage from previous crashes.
"Mostly, they turned out to be vertical rock formations," Amrhein said. "We have some sheer cliff rocks that could imitate a wing or a piece of an airplane."
Even in testing that had been a problem, said Roy Dreibelbis, a former Air Force helicopter pilot turned NASA consultant.
Like other experts, Dreibelbis says crash victims could be found sooner if the beacons in small planes were more reliable and crash-resistant.
Some progress has been made, he said, and NASA is developing a satellite system to ferret out crash-beacon signals and relay them to search headquarters.
The Distress Alerting Satellite System would relay the location of a crash faster and more accurately than the search-and-rescue satellite system currently in use, he said.
"The receivers are going to be on board Global Positioning System satellites and immediately re-transmit the (crash-beacon) signals back down to ground stations ... around the world," Dreibelbis said. "The bottom line is in about five minutes, the rescue coordination center will have the alert and its location ... within five nautical miles versus 20 nautical miles now.
"If you're out there bleeding to death, that's ... important."
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