-rescue teams moving to ground search
Two days of searching have yielded no sign of the US plane that disappeared on Saturday with three foreign nationals on board in the Cuyuni area.
Director of the Guyana Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) Zulficar Mohamed last evening told Stabroek News that the search party returned to Georgetown yesterday empty-handed. He said there was no sighting of the Beech King Air N87V, which was last heard from at around 3.06 pm on Saturday, and search and rescue teams have began shift their focus from aerial to ground searches. A full-scare search and rescue mission, coordinated by the GCAA’s Rescue Coordination Centre, was launched after the plane’s disappearance, with Senior Air Traffic Control Officer Roy Sookhoo as the search and rescue coordinator.
So far, the GCAA has reported that no Emergency Locator Transmitter (ELT) signal, no updated sport tracker report, no verbal communication, including radio communication with Air Traffic Control and no satellite communication report have been received since the aircraft was declared missing. Additionally, no indication of a crash, smoke, or remnants of a crash fire has been observed.
Americans James Wesley Barker, 28, and Chris Paris, 23, the Captain and First Officer, respectively, were on board the plane along with Canadian Patrick Murphy, a Geophysics technician, when it disappeared. The aircraft was chartered from Dynamic Aviation Inc by Terraquest Ltd to conduct geophysical surveys on behalf of Prome-theus Resources (Guyana) Inc, a subsidiary of the Toronto-based U3O8 Corporation.
The Guyana Defence Force (GDF) Air-Corps and Special Forces are leading the search operation with two British Royal Air Force helicopters along with five other planes.
Mohamed said Dynamic Aviation brought in a plane yesterday to join the search and the company is expected to fly in another Beech craft today. He said the company’s vice-chairman is currently in Guyana and is helping to offset the expense of the search mission.
According to Mohamed, the search party will have to conduct searches on the ground and speak to people in the area since even if the plane went down it would be difficult for them to spot anything in the jungle-like area. GDF Special Forces are expected to continue ground searches and interviews with local residents wherever possible.
In a statement, the GCAA said seven aircraft were used to conduct the rescue mission along with personnel from the authority and the army. Among the residents interviewed in the search area so far is Annette Miller, the mother of an eight-year-old, who reported seeing an aircraft in distress fitting the description of the missing aircraft. The helicopters searched the areas but were unsuccessful. The helicopters conducted thorough searches along the escarpment and gorges that were not accessible by the fixed wing aircraft that were part of the search.
Meanwhile, in a press release issued yesterday, U3O8 Corporation said that its board and management are deeply concerned about the missing crew and that their thoughts and support are with the crew and their families during this uncertain time.
U3O8 is a Canadian mineral exploration company based in Toronto, Canada and is currently focused on uranium exploration in the Roraima Basin in Guyana. It says its primary business objective is to explore, develop and acquire uranium projects in the Americas. It added that it is well funded with over $12 million held solely in cash and Canadian chartered bank-backed Guaranteed Investment Certificates. At current rates of exploration expenditure, the company expects to be funded up until 2010.
According to the company it has the exclusive uranium exploration rights in an area covering approximately 1.3 million hectares that straddles the edge of the Roraima Basin in Guyana. The company is advancing a two-pronged exploration strategy that focuses on exploration for multiple uranium-bearing structures within structural systems in the basement adjacent to the Roraima Basin, with the concept that the individual veins could potentially aggregate to a significant total resource; and exploration for unconformity-style uranium deposits at the base of the Roraima Basin, which are similar to those of the prolific Athabasca Basin in Saskatchewan.
