Last weekend, the FBI conducted raids on suspected members of a Christian militia in the Midwest that was allegedly planning to kill police officers. In the past year, federal agents have seen an increase in “chatter” from an array of domestic extremist groups, which can include radical self-styled militias, white separatists or extreme civil libertarians and sovereign citizens.
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.
“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.
“Where are the thunderstorms now?” Frank asked on the phone. His wife, Kara, rolled her eyes and looked at her watch for the umpteenth time that afternoon. Kara had been in real estate, but the real estate market had all but dried up in California in the current economic meltdown, so she did part-time fill-in work for other agents, mostly doing escrow paperwork and staging and showing homes. She never liked the idea of owning something as complex and extravagant as an airplane, and only agreed to go on this weeklong cross-country trip because she was assured of being able to see her parents in Kansas as well as Frank’s folks in Nevada.
“The northern edge of the band of thunderstorms is about fifty miles south of Battle Mountain,” the briefer repeated.
Frank’s face brightened, and he made a sausage-shaped drawing on the sectional chart he had on the desk in the flight planning room to indicate where the storm was, then drew an arrow representing the storm’s direction of movement. Kara looked at the circle and looked relieved as well. “So from Elko I can outrun the storms,” he said, “and if the controller tells me the weather is getting close, I can deviate farther north around them.”
“Do you have weather-avoidance or — detection equipment?”
“No,” Frank replied.
“How about NextGen?”
“No,” he repeated. NextGen, or Next Generation, was the new air traffic control system that used datalinks aboard an aircraft to broadcast its GPS satellite-derived position, ground speed, course, and altitude to air traffic control, rather than using ground-based radar. NextGen was designed to increase air traffic control coverage and efficiency and eliminate radar blind spots in higher terrain, but it was expensive and not required to be on small general aviation aircraft for several years.
“Radar coverage is spotty in that general area,” the briefer said. “Unless you’re up pretty high or right on the airway, you may be in and out of radar coverage.” Left unsaid was the fact that air traffic control radars were designed to track aircraft, not weather — although newer digital systems were better than the old analog ones, weather avoidance was not a major part of a controller’s skills.
“I’ll plan on being on the airway, and I have oxygen just in case I need to go higher.” Kara scowled at that comment. She hated wearing the little rubbery oxygen masks because they dried her nose and throat and made her claustrophobic.
“Roger,” the briefer said. He continued his briefing with terminal weather conditions and forecasts. Although their destination on this trip was Sparks, Nevada, where they planned to visit the in-laws, the planned overnight stop was Carson City because they had very inexpensive fuel there at the self-serve pump, almost two dollars per gallon less than Reno. The forecast was for cooler temperatures behind the front, but skies would be clear and winds were out of the west, right down the east — west runway at Carson — perfect. The briefer then read winds-aloft forecasts, which were not much better than the radar summary — strong south-to-southwesterly winds ahead of the front, switching to westerly winds behind the front, with light-to-moderate turbulence forecast above twelve thousand feet. He concluded his briefing with, “Anything else I can help you with today?”
“I’d like to go ahead and file,” Frank said. Kara smiled, silently clapped her hands, then turned to her son, Jeremy, and told him to start packing up his drawing pads and colored pencils, which he had scattered all over the flight-planning-room floor.
The briefer was silent for a long moment, obviously not expecting the guy to launch into such mean-looking weather. But it was not his job to tell a pilot to fly or not to fly, just to give him all the information he requests. “Stand by and I’ll call up the flight-plan page… Okay, I have IFR, Cessna Two-Eight-Three-Four Lima, a Charlie-One-Eighty-Two slant Golf, departing at twenty hundred Zulu, route of flight Battle Mountain, Lovelock, Carson City direct at ten thousand feet. Go ahead with the rest.”
“Two-point-five hours en route, no remarks, five hours’ fuel on board, alternate is Reno International,” Frank replied. He gave his name, his San Carlos, California, address, his cell-phone number, three souls on board, and his aircraft’s colors of white with blue stripes.