A Time for Patriots

THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE SEARCH:

Update on Nebraska Plane Crash

— Krystle Kacner, KDLT, Sioux Falls, South Dakota

— November 27, 2010

— Earlier this week, the Civil Air Patrol found a missing single engine plane that took off from Chamberlain, headed for Omaha.

The plane that crashed Sunday night was found in northeastern Nebraska, and resulted in the death of the two people on board. But before the aircraft was found, a lot of people put in a lot of work.

“At first it was a little nerve wracking, because it was my first mission, but then as I came here and started doing everything we were supposed to, it wasn’t really thinking, it was just doing,” said Cadet Chief Master Sergeant Elizabeth Foy.

Cadet Chief Master Sergeant Elizabeth Foy got the call early in the morning, right before she headed off to school at O’Gorman High School.

But, once she arrived at the Sioux Falls Civil Air Patrol headquarters, all her training started to kick in.

“It’s more of you need to get it done faster, there’s no goofing off… As part of the ground team, it was making sure we were looking at all times outside the window making sure all the leaders stayed on track,” said Foy.

… “Yes I’m a sophomore in High School but I can make a difference, so that’s really the greatest part for me,” said Foy…

ANOTHER SAVE FOR NEVADA WING:

— gocivilairpatrol.com

— December 11, 2010

— Congratulations are due to all who participated in mission 10M0964A, resulting in the location of a lost hunter in Lincoln county. N9459M, piloted by Rick Parker and crewed by Clyde Cooper and Bill Petersen, spotted the 83 year old man and talked in a Sheriff’s ground team. The man was airlifted by helicopter to medical facilities.

Eleven total personnel and two aircraft were involved in the search. AFRCC [Air Force Rescue Coordination Center] has officially awarded Nevada Wing its second find and save for this fiscal year.

Prologue

This is the porcelain clay of humankind.

— John Dryden

Elko, Nevada

Summer 2013

“Severe thunderstorm activity along your route of flight,” the Federal Aviation Administration Flight Service Station weather briefer began. “Convective SIGMET Seven Charlie for Nevada, Idaho, California, and Utah, heavy-to-severe thunderstorms in a one-hundred-mile-long band fifty miles southeast of Battle Mountain, Nevada, moving from two-two-zero at fifteen knots, tops above flight-level three-niner-zero, with heavy rain, hail, and damaging winds with gusts over fifty knots.”

Cripes, the young pilot thought, it was one of the worst weather observations he had ever heard. Frank Post was a software engineer from Silicon Valley, an honor graduate of Stanford University, and a fairly new instrument-rated private pilot, with a bit less than two hundred hours of flying time, most in his used single-engine Cessna C-182R Skylane. He looked at his wife sitting beside him, still wearing that impatient expression he had been forced to put up with for the past day and a half.