Air Force Pilot, Son Survive 9 Days in Turkish Snow

A U.S. Air Force pilot and his young son, given up for dead, were found alive Tuesday after surviving on not much more than snow for nine days.

Lt. Col. Michael Roland Couillard, 37, and his 10-year-old son, Matthew, were conscious, but their feet were swollen from frostbite.

“I thought we were going to die if they didn’t find us this morning. I was elated,” Couillard told the Reuters news agency.

The military search for them had been formally called off Sunday on the presumption they were dead.

In an Air Force release, the Carson native said he and his son lost their way in a snowfall while on a ski outing. They spent the night outdoors and then took shelter in a cave, remaining there for five or six days. On Sunday, the colonel left his son and went to find help. He took shelter in an unheated cottage, where woodcutters found him Tuesday.

Couillard was “very weak” but managed in broken Turkish to describe the location of the cave where he had left his son, Yuksel Gul, a forestry official, told the Anatolia news agency.

“Their reunion was a touching scene,” Gul said. “Although the colonel had difficulty moving, he struggled to his feet and hugged his son in tears.”

At Carson High School, where Michael Couillard graduated in 1974, school officials made plans to broadcast news of his rescue during homeroom today.

“I’m so proud of him, and so glad,” said Assistant Principal Anne Schwab, who remembers Couillard as a quiet student who was interested in chemistry and helped plan a conference of science fiction and Star Trek fans.

She called him the type of enterprising individual who could survive such an ordeal.

“He was a leader, and he was a thinker,” Schwab said Tuesday. “He would think out a situation like that. I kept thinking that was something he would know and he would do.”

Times staff writer Deborah Schoch in Torrance contributed to this report.