Without a Trace : Search for Lost Marine Fliers Finds Frustration

No movement could be seen on the baking desert sand Wednesday except for the hulking shadows of two U.S. Marine helicopters, gliding in tandem like giant green insects a scant 200 feet aloft.

All day long, the Tustin-based helicopters scoured a 500-square-mile area just north of Lake Havasu, searching in vain for any sign of a lost Marine observation plane and its two-man crew. The OV-10A Bronco, based at Camp Pendleton, vanished without a trace last Thursday while on a routine practice flight over the Southern California desert.

“I say UFOs kidnaped ‘em,” Capt. Mike Griggs, co-pilot of one of the helicopters, said in exasperation as he maneuvered his olive-green CH-46 Sea Knight back toward the Marine Corps Air Station at Tustin following Wednesday’s search, which yielded no fresh clues.

The question of what happened to the twin-engine Bronco, so far, is a mystery to Marine Corps officials.

They know only that pilot Sergio Vivaldi, 29, of Port Chester, N.Y., and his observer, 1st Lt. Joel Piehl, of Bismarck, N.D., departed Camp Pendleton at 11:30 a.m. last Thursday on what was to be a three-hour reconnaissance flight. The plane never returned. The crew made no radio contact. Air-traffic-control radar was unable to track them.

Since then, about 150 planes have spent more than 800 hours scouring every nook and cranny over 324,000 square miles of Southern California desert between the Mexican border and Nevada. They also have checked witnesses’ reports of black smoke, possibly from a plane, seen billowing in the towering mountains above Palm Springs.

But, as of Wednesday, the Marines were no closer to finding the plane--which did not carry an emergency transmitter as most civilian planes do--than they were when the search first started.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Maj. Gen. Royal Moore Jr., commander of the 3rd Marine Air Wing based at El Toro, said in a briefing before more search efforts continued Wednesday.

Although military aircraft disappear from time to time while on practice flights, Marine officials say that most are located within a matter of days, if not hours. With the OV-10A Bronco now missing for so long, Moore said the disappearance has few precedents. He also said the Marines may be forced to call off the search if something is not turned up soon.

“We can’t keep this up forever,” the general said, adding that neither he nor any of the other Marines involved in the search want to give up. “Our real concern is that we’re leaving somebody in the battlefield. We have two Marines that we can’t find.”

Moore said, however, that there was little more new ground to search. Marine officials, working out of a command post at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, already had divided the Southern California desert into 30-mile-by-30-mile quadrants, then arranged for individual military planes and helicopters to canvass each tract.

This was done, first, by other OV-10 Bronco planes, which flew from north to south at altitudes of 500 feet, beginning at the Arizona border and working back, Moore said. The planes were followed by teams of slower-flying helicopters, assigned to cruise from west to east at 200 feet, Moore said.

Wednesday marked the completion of the search through all the quadrants. The two remaining quadrants--located on both the California and Arizona sides of the border north of Lake Havasu City--were scoured by six Tustin-based helicopters, flying in formations of two.

With that task completed, Moore said he intends to concentrate the search on the San Bernardino and San Jacinto mountain ranges near Palm Springs. Military planes, assisted by volunteers from the Civil Air Patrol, already have been looking without success throughout those mountains.

Marine officials say it appears increasingly likely that the plane crashed and the crew members either did not survive or were seriously injured. That speculation is based on the fact that there have been no distress signals picked up from the pocket-held emergency beepers that all Marine airmen are required to wear in the event they go down. Moore said signals from the beepers can be detected 150 miles away.

The task, then, has been to find where the plane may have crashed.

“The trouble with this area is it is extremely rough (terrain),” Moore said. “I could lose probably 100 OV-10s in there.”

Flying over the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains while en route to the search area Wednesday, Maj. J.V. (Ace) McLain, public affairs director for the 3rd Wing, peered from his helicopter at brush-choked canyons and ravines below. Neither he nor three other crew members aboard could pick out anything of importance.

“This is like looking for a needle in a haystack; only we don’t even know where the haystack is,” McLain said.

While it seemed unlikely that the missing plane had veered as far east as the Arizona border--more than 200 miles away from Camp Pendleton and at the outer limits of the Bronco’s three-hour flying range--the helicopter crews left no stone unturned in a grueling, six-hour search. Although the two target areas were distinguished as “Echo” and “Zulu” by the Marines, the stark, sun-baked terrain looked much the same.

The CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters piloted by Maj. Stan Wells and Maj. Mike Minnehan were responsible for the far northern part of the “Echo” quadrant, stretching from Needles on the south to Laughlin, Nev., on the north and 30 miles west from the Colorado River. Wells’ crew, riding in “Knightrider 50,” included co-pilot Griggs and the crew chief, Cpl. Paul Romano. Minnehan’s crew, riding in “Knightrider 53,” included the co-pilot, Capt. Mike Griggs, and crew chief, Cpl. Todd Hanna. The helicopters flew in formation--five rotor-lengths apart--at speeds of about 65 m.p.h over flat desert lake beds dotted with sagebrush and pocked by washes. At slower speeds, they followed the contour of jagged mountain ranges. The helicopters cleared some peaks by a margin of less than 50 feet.

“It really is pretty, and fun to fly in,” Griggs remarked to Wells as their helicopter glided precariously close up an Arizona mountainside studded with saguaro cacti.

But the Marines weren’t here on a sightseeing trip and they never let the purpose of their mission get far from mind.

With so much terrain to scan, the search grew monotonous. The quadrants were examined by the helicopters flying first in one direction, then in another and another until their area was completed. It took a total of seven “passes,” for instance, to clear the “Echo” sector. For the Marines wearing stifling flying suits, the search was also made more grueling by 109-degree temperatures, for which the only relief came in two refueling breaks at the air-conditioned airport at Lake Havasu City.

But even in their discomfort, the Marines were reluctant to call off the search as daylight waned.

“These (missing airmen) are our brothers in arms,” McLain said. “They would have done the same for us.”