Posted on: Monday, January 27, 2003

Weather impedes search for plane

By Karen Blakeman
Advertiser Staff Writer

A 17-year-old pilot and his Cessna 172 remained unaccounted for yesterday as the Coast Guard spent a second day combing the rugged, cloud-shrouded terrain along the northern coastline of Moloka'i.

The Coast Guard called in its helicopter and airplane crews as darkness fell last night, said Petty Officer 3rd Class David Mosley, a Coast Guard spokesman.

The search for Chezray Hayes is expected to continue at first light this morning. Coast Guard officials say the search is a difficult one because of the weather, limited visibility and the terrain, but that difficulty is amplified because the emergency locator transmitter aboard Hayes' aircraft does not appear to be emitting a signal.

The transmitter problem has plagued two other recent searches for missing aircraft in or around the state.

Hayes, an O'ahu boy with 30 hours of flight experience, had been piloting solo in the small, single-engine, four-seater aircraft from Honolulu to Maui on Saturday.

Student pilots are allowed to fly solo at age 16 and may obtain a private pilot's license when they are 17. Civil Air Patrol officials said that he is one of their cadets.

He checked in with Moloka'i tower at about 12:15 p.m. Saturday, reporting that the flight was proceeding normally and that he was flying along the Moloka'i shore, just north of Kalaupapa.

Radar checks made by the Federal Aviation Administration's Honolulu Flight Services are difficult along that part of Moloka'i because of the mountainous terrain, said Chief Petty Officer Craig Dente, a Coast Guard search-and-rescue mission coordinator, but Hayes' flight was picked up intermittently.

Hayes had said he would check in with the tower again as he reached the eastern edge of Moloka'i, but the call, expected at 12:24 p.m., never came.

Federal officials checked all airfields in the Islands to make sure Hayes had not deviated, then called in the Coast Guard. HH-65 Dolphin helicopter and C-130 Hercules airplane crews were launched, and searched the area Saturday and yesterday. "The weather isn't cooperating," said Lt. Cmdr. David C. Billburg, pilot of the HH-65 helicopter launched at dawn yesterday.

The winds were light, and clouds wrapped themselves around the high, steep mountainsides that tower over Moloka'i's northern shore, Billburg said.

The flight conditions, with the rain and low clouds, were extremely hazardous Saturday and yesterday, Billburg said, but he and co-pilot Lt. j.g. Harry Greene dipped through the clear spots along the peaks and valleys while the C-130 crews, assisted by the Civil Air Patrol and by a Fire Department helicopter out of Maui, searched the waters.

A pilot from George's Aviation Services, which owns the plane Hayes was flying, along with Hayes family members, also assisted with the search, Coast Guard officials said.

Tony Schena of the Civil Air Patrol said the volunteer pilots who often assist authorities in search-and-rescue or Civil Defense matters helped with the search. "We got his name," Schena said, "and he was one of our cadets. That is why we got involved: He was one of our own." The Civil Air Patrol flew search patterns over the channel between Lana'i and Maui, he said.

Billburg said a man who lives in a cabin on a remote cliff side contacted the Coast Guard pilots by radio, and told them he had heard Hayes' plane flying over shortly after noon Saturday — about the same time Hayes reported in to Moloka'i tower. Coast Guard officials said the man frequently tracks the progress of flights along Moloka'i's north shore.

Billburg said the man reported nothing amiss.

The Coast Guard pilot said he had no explanation for why the emergency locator transmitter aboard Hayes' plane had not emitted a homing signal. Without it, even if the weather improves today, the search is likely to remain extremely difficult.

Beneath the clouds, the jungle canopy extends 20 to 30 feet above the ground, easily high enough to conceal a Cessna lodged in the brush, he said.

Coast Guard and other federal aviation officials say emergency transmitters, which are automatically activated by pressure, are highly reliable and more likely to cause problems by emitting signals when no crash has occurred than to fail to activate after a hard landing on land or water.

But Billburg and Dente both said this is the third recent search-and-rescue operation in or near the state where the signal was not emitted.

On July 13, Steve Betsill of Maui died when his plane crashed in East Maui. Federal investigators discovered that the battery was disconnected from the plane's emergency locator transmitter.

Last month, Harrison Roth, 51, of Tinian, in the Northern Mariana Islands, was piloting a fixed-wing Piper Seneca from Honolulu to Majuro, in the Marshall Islands, when his plane disappeared. No signal was emitted from the locator transmitter, and his plane has not been found, Coast Guard officials said.