04/24/2026
THE SEARCH CONTINUES. Randy Park
What happens when the active search for a missing aircraft ends? The intensity of the previous two weeks fades, but military and civilian aircraft continue to fly over the search area looking for that one sighting that will answer the question, “What happened?” The search continues under the guise of training flights into the search area. CASARA Yukon, for example, continues to look for the USAF Douglas C-54 Skymaster that disappeared in January 1950. The families need to know. We need to know.
Photo #1
Is this the crash site? Is that aircraft debris? This is a screen print from Google Earth taken by Ray Wong, which shows what I remember seeing in October 2024.
How does one explain a reflection coming down from high in the mountains?
Such was the scenario we experienced in 2024 in southeastern British Columbia. What could it be? A shiny rock? Or something man made? A structure of some kind? A vehicle such as logging equipment. Or possibly, a missing aircraft? A shiny rock, not much chance. A house or structure, on a south facing slope, unlikely. Logging equipment, possible, but the tree line is close, meaning unlikely. A missing aircraft, possible, and an aircraft is missing in the greater area.
Such was the scenario we faced in October 2024. I was in the back country with family members, who generally speaking, had an above average knowledge of aircraft and helicopter operations. Even the outhouse at the cabin had a selection of helicopter and aircraft magazines!! Bob is the father of a helicopter pilot who regularly flies into one of BC’s most rugged areas, the Bugaboos, where his passengers enjoy heli-skiing. And Doug is an advanced paramedic who has flown in all manner of aircraft, and has trained and coordinated a middle eastern country’s response to tidal waves, earthquakes and assorted world catastrophes. And at the time, I was a CASARA - PEP Air member with spotter and homing specialist credentials.
Photo #2
Photo #3
On my departure day from the area, after discussions about next steps, I was taken to a forestry landing which was the location where Bob and Doug had seen that reflection. I never saw that reflection, but I did see something that invited further investigation. Our optics were good, but not up to the distances we were viewing that ‘object of interest’ that day. Our spotting scopes and binoculars were adequate for most sightings within a kilometer, but the source of the reflection was many times that distance. And significantly higher.
We were in the Purcell mountains, and according to the ‘Check-in/OK’ message from my SPOT X device, we were at latitude 50.12637 and longitude -116.07936, and at an altitude of 1316.0 meters or 4318 feet.
Simply stated, the sighting was north of Kimberley, south of Invermere, and west of Columbia lake.
The elipse shows the rough area of the target of interest.
This wasn’t just a sighting of interest, but it had the potential to be much much more. In British Columbia, PEP Air is the volunteer air search and rescue agency, and PEP Air is a member of CASARA. CASARA is the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association which exists in every province and territory of Canada. We are a civilian agency that reports to and is funded by the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), and specifically by the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), in support of search and rescue (SAR) in Canada. CASARA’s mission is to support Canada’s Search and Rescue program and to promote SAR awareness.
This object of interest, as undefined as it was, needed to be followed up on and investigated further. The search never ends, until we find the missing. We knew of an aircraft that had disappeared in this broader area of southeast BC a few years previously. C-GDTK disappeared into bad weather on a flight from Cranbrook (YXC) to Kamloops (YKA) with two persons onboard. C-GDTK is a Piper PA-28-161 Warrior II. The last sighting that I’m aware of was by an Air Canada pilot in Kimberley who saw a Piper Warrior over the city on that fateful day in June 2017.
Photo #5
Photo #6
This is a small part of the search area for C-GDTK west and north west of Kimberley in 2017.
Photo #7
Spotters Grant Tulloch and Allister Pedersen in front of the Buffalo search aircraft in 2017.
The aircraft was enroute from Cranbrook to Kamloops. A small portion of the search area for
C-GDTK was north and west of Kimberley BC, as shown above. The Piper Warrior went missing on Thursday June 8, 2017, with 2 persons onboard.
The search area was extensive over British Columbia’s mountainous interior. The air miles distance from Cranbrook YXC to Kamloops YKA IS 230.3 miles, or 354.5 km, or 191.4 nautical miles. The active search for C-GDTK was terminated after two weeks. Thereafter the search for the missing aircraft continues, but on a less urgent basis.
Two identical photos of the area, one marked to show the object of interest, and mountain features. The object of interest is difficult to see, but it is the white spot that lies at the very tip of the red arrow. And could that white spot indicate a fire at the crash site??
With respect to our object of interest, I took photos, recorded the position via SPOT X, took a rough bearing from the forestry landing to the source of the reflection. So what now? This was something that needed to be followed up on, but how?
I sought the advice of CASARA Liaison Officer (CLO) Captain Trevor Pellerin at RCAF 442 Squadron Comox BC, indicating that we had found something that should be investigated further. I explained that the sighting could be anything from a shiny rock to abandoned logging equipment to a downed aircraft. Whatever it was, it needed to be checked out.
Shortly thereafter I received sighting information from Capt. Pellerin detailing a
sighting of a similar reflection from the mountains above Kootenay Lake near Boswell. All good information to be sure, but my sighting was some 60 km distant, east of Kootenay Lake, or to be more specific some 20 km west of Columbia Lake or Canal Flats BC.
Capt. Pellerin requested an accurate latitude / longitude that he could share with the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre (JRCC) and they could check their database which could lead to an early resolution.
And then I blew it. A few days after Thanks Giving 2024 I sat down at my desk and estimated the location of the sighting, using Google Earth, and multiple paper maps. I estimated the location based on the rough bearing we had, the height of land thought to be 1000-2000 feet above the forestry landing where we were located, the general profile of nearby mountain ridges, and 4-5 kilometers distant, somewhat close to the treeline. Using this criteria I estimated the position of the object of interest. As it turned out, the latitude / longitude position that I came up with was not even close. I chose 5 kilometers. That’s a SWAG assessment. Scientific wild ass guesswork. More later.
The Joint Rescue Coordination Centre responded a couple days later, with surprising data. JRCC found two crashes in the vicinity of the coordinates I provided. And both crashes occurred two days apart in August 1979.
C-FEFO, an Aerostar 600, white and blue impacted terrain at 7500 feet in a box canyon, scattered wreckage. 50.2167N and 116.0833W.
C-GZYP, a Cessna 172, white with two-tone brown trim impacted mountain at 6300 feet in a narrow valley, twister aircraft wreckage. 50.1667N and 116.25W.
What was the cause of these crashes? No idea. The records are available but not online. Is the wreckage still there? Again, no idea. I will leave it to adventurers or to local ground search and rescue folk to schedule an exercise to go in and have a look. Let me know, please and thank you.
These crash sites were 5 km and 12 km from my first estimated sighting position, and one was not on the bearing that was used to estimate the location of our object of interest.
The coordinates for the crash sites might be slightly different because of the version of the Coordinate Reference System used to build the maps. NAD27 vs NAD83. We can get you close, but after that it’s up to you.
The map coordinates used thus far are those as recorded on my own devices or as provided to me in the format shown. PEP Air / CASARA prefers degrees, minutes and decimal minutes. If I were to convert all to the same format at this point, then I might unintentionally introduce error.
At this point in the search to investigate this sighting, along with the two 1979 crash sites, both Captain Pellerin and Warrant Officer David Knubley suggested a ‘look see’ flight aboard the CC-295 Kingfisher. How I wanted that to happen, and pick me up enroute please. But regretfully that didn’t happen. Both Capt. Pellerin and WO Knubley were the strong voices behind the ‘suggestion’ to engage the PEP Air South East zone in the sighting search.
The Victoria area Air Deputy Robert Northcott was involved and was sharing the sighting information with the PEP Air / CASARA South East zone. The support offered by the South East zone throughout this sighting search, was extraordinary. Our search for the missing doesn’t end until we find our search target.
And then it snowed, cutting off all active searches for the winter season. WO Knubley and Capt. Pellerin of 442 Squadron in Comox put the search on the back burner until the snow melted in the spring. But the search never ends. Fred Carey shared the object details with Ray Wong who spent hours looking at Google Earth along the rough bearing that I had provided. Ray scoured the area, and sent me screen shots that fit the general parameters of what I had identified. The first two images simply didn’t fit what we had seen through our various underpowered optics, but the third one did! Without his work the search to investigate the sighting would have taken so much longer. The object of interest was now pin pointed at 8.2 kilometers from the forestry landing, and nearly 3,000 feet above, based on Ray Wong’s painstaking work on Google Earth.
How could I be out by a thousand feet vertically and three kilometers laterally? Easy Peasy apparently, just follow my lead.
Allister Pedersen remembers that day in 2017 when he was at the Cranbrook airport. He remembers the solid black and gray clouds coming in from the southwest. And he remembers that an incoming Pacific Coastal flight was cancelled because of the weather. And later he remembers a SARTech on the Buffalo advising of the turbulence and cloud during an earlier flight that day which prevented effective spotting.
In subsequent years on training flights searching potential areas of interest, a spotter noted that his daughter worked at MDA in Richmond, with access to satellite data from RADARSAT. Allister followed up with MDA (formerly MacDonald Dettwiler Associates Ltd.) who even offered to move a RADARSAT bird to cover the search area, with appropriate settings to our needs. The result of this initiative was 80+ possible targets which could be C-GDTK, but there was no correlation between these targets and what was seen from the air. Allister would like to see a project implementation to study the use of RADARSAT for SAR needs. Work continues on this promising initiative.
The search is not over. With the assistance and support of PEP Air / CASARA members across the province and especially in the South East zone, we have pin pointed a probable location of the source of that reflection yet we still need to confirm what was there.
Captain Pellerin moved on to another assignment and was replaced by Captain Yuri Mokievsky-Zubok at RCAF 442 Squadron Comox. The winter and spring months were tough. Not from a weather perspective, but from the eyes of our members who wanted to get to the bottom of our sighting puzzle. The South East zone members tried to get to the site several times, including by foot, by quad and by snowmobile. Without success I might add. The mountains have a way of denying access. RPAS was not used, as the distances were just too far, and the risk of loss too great. PEP Air crews too went up for a look see, but the snow was just too heavy at the 7,000 foot level, and across the entire mountainside.
With the snow gone, on July 12, 2025 the South East Zone was able to fly over the target area to investigate the object of interest. There was no aircraft. There was no aircraft debris. The reflection, apparently, came from a white rock high in the mountains. The July 12, 2025 flight scoured the mountain terrain at 7200 feet.
The two persons aboard C-GDTK are still missing. I am disappointed that this sighting didn’t bring closure to the families. However, those dedicated PEP Air members from the South East Zone did everything possible to investigate the sighting. The search continues.
The flight path taken July 12, 2025 to assess the object of interest. The circuit on the right is Whitetail Lake.
Photographs and Contributions:
With thanks to:
Allister Pedersen
Tony Parchomchuk
Jeff Hodder
Ray R. Wong
Fred Carey
Trevor Pellerin
David Knubley
Martin Williams
Don MacKinnon
Robert McLean
Robert Northcott
Trish Krol
Ian Coneybeer
Alton King
Yuri Mokievski-Zubok
The pilots, navigators and spotters
