Long-Missing Lear Jet Eludes Discovery

WEST LEBANON, N.H. —  The missing Lear jet.

Mention those three words to people in New Hampshire, and they’ll know what you’re talking about. Chances are, each has a theory on where it crashed and why.

Last Christmas Eve, two professional pilots and their jet vanished while trying to land in poor weather here. Thus began the most intense search and rescue operation in state history. The aircraft was presumed down, the pilots soon presumed dead--but nothing has been found. Informal searches continue to this day, and the mystery transfixes many.

“People are absolutely still looking,” says Maj. Ronald Alie, chief of law enforcement of the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, in Concord. “Not a week goes by when there isn’t some word of a search somewhere.”

The disappearance has meant agonizing months for the families of the two Connecticut pilots, Johan Schwartz, 31, of Westport, and Patrick Hayes, 30, of Clinton. Family, friends and strangers have logged hundreds of hours in searches.

“We’re reinterviewing people and will look more after the leaves fall,” says Dr. Paul Schwartz of Westport, Johan’s father, who will continue weekend searches until the snows return. “The hunters will be valuable. They will go places no one has gone.”

He said some air searches may resume soon across the Connecticut River in Vermont near West Topsham and north. Many have looked in the hills north of the airport such as Moose Mountain, Smarts Mountain and Cube Mountain. Divers have looked in ponds. Hikers have bushwhacked off trails.

*

Also hoping for a resolution are state officials in New Hampshire who have handled hundreds of reported sightings or hearings and a few ideas from people with divining rods, psychic feelings and visions from God. Fish and Game in Concord has a file of 275 reports from all directions related to the disappearance.

“We’d like it to come to an end,” says Timothy J. Edwards, manager of Lebanon Airport and Business Park, where the Lear jet tried to land. “Unfortunately, there hasn’t been one scrap of new evidence since the plane went down Christmas Eve.”

How can an airplane just disappear in this modern age?

Easy, say pilots and woodsmen:

It’s the tip of a needle in a haystack. Thousands of acres in New Hampshire and nearby Vermont are wooded, uninhabited, uncrossed by trails or roads, thick with undergrowth. Nearby are the rugged White Mountains. The white jet vanished with snow on the ground. Thick coniferous pines can hide a broken DC-3 from someone 15 feet away, as they did on Mt. Success, near Berlin, N.H., where one crashed in 1954.

*

Over the years, dozens of airplanes have gone down in the woods after hitting mountains in storms or having engine problems. Most are soon found. Some take longer. In December 1972, hikers stumbled on wreckage and the remains of a pilot of a single-engine plane on Jenkins Peak in the Waterville Valley, N.H.--six years after it crashed. Some planes stay missing in America after decades.

When a plane crashes, it may shatter into many pieces that are hard to recognize from the air or even on the ground. Especially the Lear. It was a relatively small plane, about 48 feet long, and when last heard from, traveling at 258 mph. It would have smashed and scattered beyond easy recognition.

Unlike small propeller planes, the jet flying over land wasn’t required by law to carry--and didn’t--an emergency locater transmitter, or ELT, costing $1,000 or less. In a crash, officials say, it would have emitted a radio beacon that might have located the plane the day it disappeared.

A few conspiracy theorists guess the pilots just flew away and are living it up on some beach. No way, say aviation experts like Edwards: “There’s no evidence of that.”

Further, says Brian Boland, a balloonist and pilot who owns the small Post Mills, Vt., airport not far away: “It’s hard to hide a whole Lear jet.” On the other hand, he adds, it is often difficult to recognize parts of a crashed plane just feet away. He shows a pile of crumpled pipes no bigger than a desk--all that remains of a Piper Cub after it crash-landed and burned at the airport.

Boland’s wife, Louise, is typical of several who later told searchers she saw a white plane, apparently a jet, fly by the airport last Christmas Eve. “It was very low, it had low wings like a Lear, it was in a funny place. The whole thing struck me as weird.”

Airport manager Edwards describes the last known hours of the Lear 35 turbojet, N388LS, operated by Aircraft Charter Group Inc.

The plane took off from Bridgeport, Conn., on the morning of Dec. 24, 1996, and flew north toward Lebanon Airport to pick up John and Helen Skelly of Lyme, Conn., and their two children there and take them to Southampton, N.Y., for Christmas.

Pilot Schwartz and copilot Hayes, both experienced fliers, arrived in the area about 10 a.m. It was raining, and the ceiling was 1,000 feet. They contacted the tower. Flying above 1,000 feet, they were not seen.

The pilot tried to line up the jet toward a north-south runway, but he missed the approach for reasons unknown. He aborted the landing and said he would circle and land on the other runway heading from east to west.

The pilot radioed, “Lear three eight eight lima sierra is VOR outbound.” (VOR is an electronic navigational aid; it was four miles from the airport.) He was flying away from the airport, to circle and return. It was his last message.

“There was no squeal,” reports Edwards, a former pilot. “No mayday call. In fact, no call whatsoever from the aircraft. It’s a mystery. The bottom line is, no one knows what happened to these guys.”