Condolences to Joe's family. It is always grim to hear these reports.

As a Civil Air Patrol pilot, I think I'll weigh in on the search and rescue question. I have been the pilot on two real searches by the Douglas County squadron and participated (not as a CAP pilot, but in a private capacity) in the Steve Fossett search, and I have flown some half dozen S&R exercises as a CAP Mission Pilot. Perhaps my experience will be instructive to fellow glider pilots.

First, CAP is a volunteer organization. When we are called by the local sheriff we try to respond, but it is not always possible to field a team. And we do work as a team. We do not send an individual pilot out to do a search. He is accompanied by two trained observers who can help him operate the GPS so he flies an efficient search (covers the ground completely without overlaps or gaps) and have eyes on the ground as he flies the airplane. And the three people in the plane are not the only members of the team -- there is also an Incident Commander and radio operator, at a bare minimum, to keep track of the search team's flight to help them get a ground team in place quickly if they need one and so on. So it is not a small effort, but it is well planned and staffed, not just some pilot droning over uncharted desert without a clue of where he should be looking.

Secondly, we have well designed search patterns that are programmed into our GPS so we can cover ground thoroughly but without repeating unnecessarily.. To start a search, though, we need to have a sense of where to look. It would be pointless to say "well I think Joe was headed southeast, so just head out that way and see if you see anything." Instead, we try to have a fix on the last known contact -- by SPOT or radar, whatever -- and to design a search based on that fix. If we have some reason to believe the plane we are searching for was last heard from at a given point and was heading south from there, we can perform a line search. If we have no sense of the direction of travel, we can perform an expanding square search from the last known point. And if the terrain is hilly, we can perform a contour search around the area of last contact. IOW, we have good search tools to put into use, but without knowing where to begin it's a huge task for one or two small planes. Oh, and BTW, when we send a plane into a search grid (we divide the US up into "grids" of a quarter section each) we don't assign another plane to the same grid until the first one has reported out of the grid.. There is little to be gained by having two planes in the same block of air, trying to fly a careful pattern but looking out to avoid another plane in the same bit of sky.

So what we really need is a fix on the last known location. I have tracked glider pilots using SPOT, and know the technology has a bad habit of dropping one and sometimes two ten-minute reports. That means a fix from a SPOT tracker could be 10-20 miles away from where we think it stopped. That's a huge error when you're searching blocks of ground that are 5 by 15 miles -- the debris field might be three grids away very easily. So we try to have a pretty decent LKP (last known position) before we launch.

On the Fossett search no one knew which direction he departed or where he intended to go. Since the Hilton Ranch is at the foot of Mt. Grant, just over the hill from Hawthorne and Walker Lake, the search concentrated at first on Mt. Grant. For two days aircraft covered every square inch (and I mean that quite literally -- I looked at the combined GPS tracks of the search aircraft and there was no white space between ground tracks) of Mt. Grant without seeing anything. Since the Citabria he was flying held 4 hours' fuel, we then expanded the search to cover as much territory as we could inside a circle defined by 240 minutes of flight. That was a huge area and there were a lot of gaps in the ground coverage. And when the wreckage was finally found two years later we understood just how difficult our search really was -- the tube-and-fabric plane had crumpled so the largest piece was the engine -- something you could fit in the trunk of most modern cars. If we had known exactly where his A/C impacted the ground it is entirely possible we never would have seen it from 1,000' in the air. I've looked at a wrecked glider from 300' in the air -- a wreck where the wings detached but remained intact -- and it was not easy to spot. Steve's Citabria was vastly smaller.

I hope this gives some perspective on just how hard it is to search from a moving A/C.

Fred