Search Teams Give Up Hunt for Pair’s Plane : Aviation: Air, ground crews call off their effort to find couple whose craft is believed to have crashed in Nevada on Oct. 29.

Search teams in the air and on the ground failed Monday in their attempts to locate a missing Placentia couple who disappeared on a flight in a private aircraft more than two weeks ago, according to Maj. Phillip Brown of the Civil Air Patrol.

Pilot Larry Richards and passenger Barbara Keating, both 56, have been missing since Oct. 29, when they were en route to Nampa, Ida., from Jean, Nev., Brown said.

Searchers had held to a slim hope that a clicking signal heard on a radio by one of the rescue search teams on Saturday came from the lost plane’s emergency locater transmitter. But on Monday all search by air was ended.

“The Civil Air Patrol and the Air Force have suspended their search for the aircraft,” Brown said. “It’s pretty much stalled unless we get a lead or a new clue.”

However, the family late Monday night urged the Civil Air Patrol to try again.

A ground search team checked reports that a hunter might have come across orange-colored wreckage of the plane in the Diamond Valley area, about 100 miles south of Elko. But on Monday a team headed by Elko County Sheriff’s Lt. Curtis Watson found only the hulk of an orange water tanker trailer, which officials said may have been used by miners in the area.

“We’ve chased down our last lead and it was a dead end,” Watson said. “We are terminating the active search.”

“We have flown more than 65,000 miles since the search began on Nov. 3,” said Brown, who added that the mileage does not include California and Idaho units also involved in the search.

Heather Wilson, 33, daughter of Barbara Keating and an employee of Larry Richards, said both families were devastated by the news that the search has been stopped.

“My older brother Ian was up there with the Sheriff’s Department and he told us that the lead we had hoped would lead to them was just an old water tanker,” Wilson said from her home in Placentia.

Wilson also said that both families still have hope. She said Richards and Keating had experienced a previous plane mishap in an isolated portion of Montana and had managed to survive unscathed.

“They had trouble one time with one of the engines when they were on their way to Kansas and had to make a landing,” Wilson said, adding that they made weekly trips in the twin-engine Beechcraft.

“They were never scared of flying. In that way they were a little too free-spirited,” she said.