Audio clip
Bob Edwards
More than a month after a Sand Mountain missionary pilot went missing in the jungles of Venezuela, members of a search team continue the hunt for signs of their friend from thousands of miles away.
A helicopter pilot planned to comb the jungle Tuesday, flying over some of the 29 points of interest the search team identified on high-resolution, specially ordered satellite images.
“There’s more than one (missing pilot) that has come out months later,” said search party leader Bob Edwards, of McMinn-ville, Tenn., who works as an engineer in LaFayette, Ga.
Bob Norton, an Adventist Medical Aviation pilot from Jackson County, Ala., and six other occupants of his plane last were heard from Feb. 16 when they were near the Gran Sabana area on the border of Venezuela and Brazil, according to mission group officials.
Mr. Norton’s sister Barbara Kay, whose father, Elwin Norton, also was a missionary pilot before he died in a crash in Mexico, applauded the search efforts, but she said God had told her searchers never would find her brother alive.
“If he were alive, he would have sent out some kind of smoke signal; he would have gotten out some kind of message in the first week,” she said. “There’s been nothing but silence.”
Despite her belief, she hopes the plane will be found so other friends and family members can have closure. She said the number of searchers was a tribute to the number of lives her brother touched.
Mr. Edwards and others raised money to pay for the satellite photos of the 600-square-kilometer area where the plane is believed to have gone down. Sixty searchers across the nation now are poring over the images, looking for any signs of a plane crash.
Mr. Edwards estimated it would take about 200 hours to comb the images the first time, and he said the images then would be studied a second time.
As of Tuesday, the volunteers have found 470 irregularities, 29 of which have been sent to pilots in Venezuela as “points of interest” warranting further inspection.
“Until we find something, we don’t know,” Mr. Edwards said.
Andy began working at the Times Free Press in July 2008 as a general assignment reporter before focusing on Northwest Georgia and Georgia politics in May of 2009. Before coming to the Times Free Press, Andy worked for the Anniston Star, the Rome News Tribune and the Campus Carrier at Berry College, where he graduated with a communications degree in 2006. He is pursuing a master’s degree in business administration at the University of Tennessee ...
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