The single engine plane landed briefly at British Columbia’s Cranbrook airport in June 2017. Its Canadian pilot, Alex Simons, and his girlfriend, Sydney Robillard, had stopped to refuel the Piper Warrior, a rented plane popular for training, before continuing westward. After struggling to get payment approved for the fuel, the couple were warned flying conditions over a nearby mountain range were rapidly deteriorating as a storm set in.
But Simons, with less than 100 hours of flight experience, departed for the city of Kamloops. The aircraft never arrived. For two weeks rescue teams searched the rugged landscape of south-eastern British Columbia. But their search found nothing.
“They just disappeared off the face of the Earth,” says Fred Carey, the head of British Columbia’s volunteer aerial search teams. More than six years later, there is still no trace of the plane or the couple – and search teams haven’t been able to give closure to a “deeply broken” family.
For decades, the Canadian province’s Civil Air Search and Rescue Association boasted a near-perfect record of finding missing planes and people. And with wide access to powerful technologies, finding wrecks should be easier with each passing year. But the aerial search teams in British Columbia that scour one of the world’s most unforgiving landscapes have found the opposite: a string of unexplained disappearances have left them emotionally shattered and searching for answers.
Aerial search and rescue has long captured the public imagination: determined volunteers criss-crossing the sky, racing to locate missing aircraft or stranded hikers. This week, those skills were on display after search teams braved challenging conditions to successfully locate a private helicopter that had crashed in the province.
But the reality is far more demanding – and thankless – than people often realise, says Carey. “We don’t need a cheering audience and we often don’t have one. We just do it because we love to fly. It’s not easy to do. It takes the right person at the right angle at the right lighting and the right time to spot something. All of that stuff has to fall into place.”
In one case, searchers located a plane that had vanished over a densely populated urban area months after initial search teams had given up.
But in the last few years, three unsolved crashes – including the rented plane carrying Simons and Robillard in eastern British Columbia – represent an unnerving blemish on their record.
“When you go and you search the area for days using every tool you have and you don’t come up with anything, that’s hard on us,” says Carey. “We’ve had pilots and spotters experiencing depression. This is new and in many ways uncomfortable for us.”
Searching for a downed plane doesn’t begin with spotters going out hunting for glints of metal, broken trees or tendrils of smoke on the landscape. First, teams study flight paths, plane types, levels of experience, weather systems and known hazards.
Today their job is made easier by technology: even in small planes, pilots have mobile phones and tablets that use powerful software to track and predict their routes. “Getting lost is not really an option any more, unless you lose all your equipment,” says Carey.
For the public, the ability to pinpoint the location of friends and family using those same devices is seemingly at odds with a plane completely vanishing.
“How can a plane just go missing? It’s mad surely with the technology these days they could at least pinpoint the location of a plane,” one user wrote in an aviation forum the year before Simons’s plane disappeared. “We have the technology to transmit pictures of Pluto back to Earth … but a plane goes missing and can’t be found?!”
In the event that a plane goes missing, British Columbia’s mountainous geography presents a challenge: more than half the province doesn’t have cellular reception, which is needed to locate a mobile phone. Without a signal, search teams must recreate a likely route. But Carey suspects this is where the odds are increasingly tilted against the search teams.
“One of the big reasons we can’t find these planes – we think – is that we can’t get inside of the head of the pilot anymore.”
Increasingly, Carey and flight instructors see younger pilots pointing to their GPS systems.
“They say: ‘I can see everything. And if I ever get into trouble in bad weather, I’m going down to the highway.’ And that’s the worst thing you can do,” he says. “If you’re in trouble, you climb high and you call for support.” Novices are often untrained for emergency landings in poor weather and this raises the possibility of encountering more difficult flying conditions that can lead to a crash.
News coverage of pilots landing small planes on highways, often hailed as quick-thinking heroes, hasn’t helped dissuade novices.
Carey points to another young couple who hit bad weather and disappeared in the province. Teams initially assumed the pilot would have climbed to escape the storm system and so they “tore apart” the nearby mountains but found nothing.
It wasn’t until a year later that a helicopter spotted a flash of metal 100 yards off the highway. “The pilot had stalled it,” says Carey. “He got down to the highway, had nowhere to go, tried to turn around, crashed it tail first. They didn’t survive. But we weren’t looking along the highway because airplanes never go down there.
“We have to start rethinking how we do this. We need to start looking where we might never have searched in the past. We need to think pilots might do something that pilots would never do.”
