February

I was called for a missing aircraft search on Feb 4th in Eastern Arkansas. We flew a parallel track East to West from roughly Jonesboro to the Mississippi river. It was a beautiful sunny day. I thought "good, scanning flat terrain for a change". However, a lot of ice remained from the previous ice/snow storm and the glare off the ice was incredible. The aircraft was later located in Alabama.

Then Tuesday Feb 5th around 11:45 pm I got called for a ground search around the Lost Bridge area. A signal from an ELT, emergency locator transmitter, from an aircraft had been picked up by the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center. We left the hangar around 12:30 and spent the entire night in the boondocks taking readings, triangulating coordinates, and tramping through the woods. It's very hard at night since we cannot go onto private property without permission and who wants to go knocking on doors at that time of night? It turned out to be an aircraft that was having some maintenance done and the mechanic had disconnected the ELT but failed to turn it off. I got home about 9:30 the next morning.