Wreckage of Long-Lost Plane Found by Searchers : Aircraft: Civil Air Patrol will continue to look for Fullerton-bound Cessna 336 Skymaster that is still missing.

In a bizarre twist in the search for the Fullerton-bound twin-engine plane with five aboard missing for 10 days, the Civil Air Patrol reported Saturday that searchers have found the wreckage of a plane that has been lost in the Mojave Desert for more than eight years.

The wreckage was identified by CAP officials as a four-passenger Mooney aircraft that was lost en route from Grand Canyon Airport in Arizona to Oakland. A 12-day search that began Aug. 11, 1983, over 124,000 square miles, failed to find the aircraft.

The wreckage, which included the remains of three bodies, was found Thursday afternoon by Nevada’s Civil Air Patrol near Interstate 40 about 30 miles west on the California side of the state border, said CAP Lt. Col. Lew Dayton. The names of the three aboard were unavailable.

The finding alarmed the families waiting for news of the whereabouts of those who disappeared Nov. 14 en route from Bullhead City, Ariz., to Fullerton Municipal Airport. “Thank God it wasn’t them,” said Norma Draeger, mother of Kathy Bird, 33, of Fullerton, one of the still-missing passengers. “But if it had been them, at least we would have had an answer.”

The missing Cessna 336 Skymaster’s pilot was Richard Niemela, 37, of La Mirada. In addition to Kathy Bird, also aboard were her husband, Jeff Bird, 32, of Fullerton; Bradley Bird, 33, of Placentia, and Natalie Erickson, 19, also of Placentia.

Draeger said that she had joined the search Friday after a private pilot offered to fly the route that the missing Cessna may have taken. She spent seven hours in the air over the desert and saw the wreckage of the 1983 flight.

“We had powerful binoculars and could see scraps of metal scattered all over and part of the tail,” she said.

She said she now realizes how difficult a desert search can be.

“It wasn’t very encouraging,” Draeger said. “I couldn’t believe how big the area is. It is so vast out there.”

San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Deputy Tom Hornsby said he also went out to the site Friday afternoon for a closer look.

“It looked like a lot of metal debris and didn’t have an outline of airplane,” Hornsby said. “It must have impacted hard and wreckage spread out. We found clothing and human remains. There was, in among the wreckage, mostly bone fragments and the pilot’s wallet.”

“There is metal all over those hills,” said CAP Lt. Col. Vernon Gross. “And wreckage and junk look the same from the air, but we have to check it out.”

By twilight Saturday, all the CAP search planes had returned to the mission base in Apple Valley.

Saturday’s search included 31 planes from California’s Civil Air Patrol and another 10 from CAP’s Nevada wing, which combed more than 20,000 square miles of mountain and desert terrain, as well as the restricted military base at Twentynine Palms, officials said.

Gross said that today’s search will expand slightly northward, but for the most part, searchers will be rechecking vast stretches of desert and mountains.