24 | AIR & SPACE airspacemag.com

COLD CASEA new team sets out to solve old disappearances. by Michael Behar

Airplanes departing Mines usually headwest, over the bay. And that autumn af-ternoon was no different: Jacobs noticedthe roar of a single-engine airplane climb-ing over the water. Though the boy builtbalsawood models of aircraft used in WorldWarII, he could not identify this airplane.But he suspected it was a P-51 Mustang.

Suddenly something odd happened.“There was this sputtering sound and

then total silence,” recalls Jacobs. He watchedstunned as the aircraft pitched upward,then pitched nose down and began falling.Jacobs alerted three bystanders,but none seemed concerned.Seconds later, the aircraft dis-appeared silently into the fog.

Jacobs climbed onto the pierrailings and strained to get a bet-ter look. “I don’t even know ifit went in the water because thecloud deck was so low,” he says.“But I assume it couldn’t havepulled up because there was nomore engine noise.”

Jacobs spoke to a nearby shop-keeper, who said if there hadbeen an accident, the authorities knewabout it. The boy went home and told hisfather; “He didn’t believe me either.”

Several days passed; the newspapers re-ported nothing. Months went by, thenyears.

In 2005, Jacobs was reading the Daily

Breeze, a South Bay paper in Los Angeles,and saw a story that finally identified whathe had seen that day. It was indeed a P-51DMustang, factory-fresh, and the pilot wasa woman, Gertrude Tompkins.

Tompkins, 32, had been flying for theWomen Airforce Service Pilots, a WorldWar II program that enlisted 1,074 wom-en to ferry military aircraft, primarily be-tween U.S. military bases. She had beenpart of a flight of three Mustangs headed

to Newark, New Jersey, on a hopscotchroute that would take four days. But hercanopy had a locking problem, so her twofellow pilots took off without her, flyingover water and then banking left, towardPalm Springs. Tompkins took off a fewhours later, following the same flight path.

When the first two pilots arrived in PalmSprings and didn’t see Tompkins, they as-sumed the canopy malfunction had ground-ed her. But after landing in Newark, theylearned that nobody had seen or heardfrom Tompkins.

For three weeks, crews searched SantaMonica Bay and the surrounding area forTompkins’ Mustang. They turned up noth-ing, and eventually called off the search.Tompkins was the only WASP who dis-appeared and was never found.

Jacobs called the reporter who had writ-ten the Daily Breeze piece, Ian Gregor, whoput him in contact with Pat Macha of Air-craftwrecks.com, a historian of aviationaccidents. Macha had been collecting ev-idence on the Tompkins case for years andhad organized searches for her airplane.

Macha and Jacobs went to the pier, and

ON THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26, 1944, 12-year-old Frank Jacobs did what he always did when school got out:

He walked a half-mile to the Manhattan Beach pier, where he liked to fish for halibut. Jacobs settled in a spot

on the pier’s north side, which gave him a view of aircraft departing from Mines Field (now Los Angeles In-

ternational Airport), about three and a half miles south. He loved catching a glimpse of an American fighter.

SEPTEMBER 2010 AIR & SPACE | 25

During World War II, Gertrude

Tompkins (above) flew a P-51 like the

one at left out of Los Angeles’ Mines

Field (far left) and into the history

books: She is the only WASP still

unaccounted for. Now a group of

searchers is on the case. Their October

2009 dive in Santa Monica Bay turned

up an engine encrusted with sea life —

but it was a Cessna 210’s, not a P-51’s.

Mike Pizzio, an underwater searcher with

the FBI, volunteered as dive leader for

the Tompkins search.

OP

PO

SIT

E L

EF

T:

CO

UR

TE

SY

RO

BE

RT

HY

MA

N;

MID

DL

E:

NA

SM

7A

35

62

8~

A;

TO

P:

CO

UR

TE

SY

LA

UR

A W

HIT

TA

LL

-SC

HE

RF

EE

; B

AC

KG

RO

UN

D:

RO

BIN

JA

CO

WA

Y/C

OU

RT

ES

Y R

OB

ER

T H

YM

AN

JO

HN

MU

NS

ON

/TH

ESTAR-LEDGER

Jacobs pointed out where he had seen theaircraft fall. “The memory has always haunt-ed me,” says Jacobs, now 78 and a retiredaerospace engineer for Northrop Grum-man. “I have always felt that somebodydied that day.”

Now another search for Tompkins is on.This one is being led by a group of volun-teers called the Missing Aircraft SearchTeam. With a diverse set of specialized skills,MAST’s members hope to locate long-lostaircraft and, in some cases, the remains ofthe pilots and passengers.

In the United States, there are more than180 cold cases involving civilian aircraftthat have gone missing, plus an uncalcu-lated number of military airplanes that

have disappeared. MAST considers takinga case when asked by family members ofthe missing, or by the agency with juris-diction over the disappearance.

IT IS EARLY OCTOBER 2009, and I amstaring at a TV monitor relaying live im-ages from a video camera being draggedalong the bottom of Santa Monica Bay insearch of Tompkins’ P-51. Next to me onthe bridge of his yacht, Disappearance, isBobby Meistrell, the 81-year-old co-founderof Body Glove, the company that devel-oped the modern-day wetsuit. Meistrellhas volunteered his boat and submersiblecamera for the search.

Hoping his camera will capture a glintof metal protruding from the sandy bot-tom, Meistrell steers the Disappearance intight circles. We’re two miles west of LAX;departing jetliners pass overhead nonstop.It’s a pleasant fall morning, and calm seasmake for ideal search conditions.

MAST’s origins go back to early 2008.One of its members, Robert Hyman, a pho-tographer, explorer, and mountaineer whohas led expeditions, had been followingthe news reports on the search for SteveFossett, a wealthy aviation record-breakerwho had disappeared in September 2007(see “Anatomy of a Search,” Feb./Mar. 2008).Like Fossett, Hyman is a fellow of The Ex-plorers Club. “When they couldn’t find

Steve, I said to myself, ‘I couldput a climbing team togetherto help the official searchersreach some of the extreme ver-tical terrain where he mighthave crashed,’ ” Hyman says.

He tapped Lew Toulmin, adisaster response manager whohas consulted for the WorldBank and U.S. Agency for In-ternational Development, andColleen Keller, a senior analyst at the sci-entific consulting firm Metron. Workingfor the U.S. Coast Guard, Metron had cre-ated SAROPS (Search and Rescue OptimalPlanning System), which can examine

winds, tides, and currents, then recom-mend where searchers should focus theirefforts. While SAROPS is designed for oceanoperations—its models located wing de-bris and bodies from Air France Flight 447,which crashed off the coast of Brazil in June2009—Keller used the methodology, alongwith Google Earth satellite photographs,to reconstruct several possible scenariosfor Fossett’s last flight. She then ranked theroutes in order of probability.

Next, Hyman recruited 28 searchers, andin September 2008 the team spent twoweeks scouring the mountains near the

Flying M Ranch inNevada, Fossett’s lastknown point of de-parture. The groupfailed to find Fos-sett’s Bellanca Su-per Decathlon, butone of the tracksthey identified withradar data from hisflight passed over

the spot where the famed aviator’s remainswere later discovered.

“We all bonded during the experience,”says Hyman. For him, the search planted aseed: A team of search-and-rescue sleuths

26 | AIR & SPACE airspacemag.com

Frank Jacobs

recalling the doomed

P-51’s path (below);

an old map of Santa

Monica Bay with

MAST’s dive targets

(right); sonar image

of T-33 debris found

in the bay — an old

mystery MAST

inadvertently helped

solve. FA

R L

EF

T:

JO

HN

MU

NS

ON

/TH

ESTAR-LEDGER

; C

OU

RT

ES

Y R

OB

ER

T H

YM

AN

(3

)

armed with the latest technology andschooled in advanced search methods couldpotentially solve some of history’s aviationmysteries.

The new group decided to make its firstcase a Cessna 182 carrying Marcy Ran-dolph, 43, and pilot William Westover, 54,that had vanished in 2006 on a sightsee-ing flight from Phoenix to Sedona, Ari-zona. The members gathered data—radartracks, cell phone records, satellite im-ages—and made plans to conduct both airand ground searches. Keller assembled areport with 14 scenarios describing howand where the Cessna might have crashed.Rather than investigate all of them, sheasked MAST members to rank each sce-

nario’s likeliness on a 1-to-10 scale. On April13, 2009, Chris Killian, a telecommunica-tions executive and wreck hunter who hasdiscovered more than 100 military aircraft,called the U.S. Forest Service to find outwhether the group needed hiking permitsto access the most likely sites. “While hewas on the phone, it occurred to him toask for fire reports,” says MAST co-founderTim Evinger. Killian learned that the daythe Cessna had gone missing, hikers pass-ing by one of Keller’s scenario sites had re-ported a fire; they had even taken a pho-tograph of it. “Lo and behold,” says Evinger,“[the airplane] was there.”

In April 2009, while examining high-

resolution sonar data in preparation forthe Tompkins search, MAST, workingwith two other search groups, UB88.ORGand Aircraftwrecks.com, located debrison the ocean floor later identified as partsof a Lockheed T-33A Shooting Star train-er that had disappeared in 1955 with twoAir Force lieutenants in it. (The parts havesince been retrieved by the local sheriff’sdepartment.)

MAST members have paid for expens-es themselves. The Tompkins search eas-ily exceeded $30,000, and had volunteerscharged for their services, the cost wouldhave been well over $1million. The groupis in the process of becoming a non-prof-it, able to accept donations for searches.

The group has 12 members. If a searchis under way, MAST will use mission-spe-cific experts. For the Tompkins search, thecrew includes sonar technicians, com-mercial divers, sport fishermen who knowSanta Monica Bay well, a cave cartographer,an off-duty FBI agent, and a guy who in-spects the water outfalls at nuclear powerplants (he’s particularly adept at squeezinginto tight spaces, underwater, in the dark).In all, more than two dozen volunteers, in-cluding members of UB88.ORG and Air-craftwrecks.com, have come from aroundthe country to participate, including threemembers of Tompkins’ extended family.

From talking to them, and to Pat Macha,

who helped coordinate the dive volunteers,I learn a little more about the pilot: Born in1912 and raised in a quiet New Jersey sub-urb, she was the third of three girls. Aftergetting an undergraduate degree from thePennsylvania School of Horticulture, shemet a pilot, a Brit living in the States. Theyfell in love and became engaged, and hetaught her to fly. Tompkins stuttered, saysgrand-niece Laura Whittall-Scherfee, butthe stuttering stopped after she learned tofly. When the war began, her fiancé joinedthe Royal Air Force, and was later shot downover England and killed. By then Tomp-kins had caught the flying bug, so in 1943she joined the WASP. She married a movieproducer named Henry M. Silver (thoughdid not take his name) a month before shedisappeared.

To identify the most promising divesites, Gary Fabian of UB88.ORG had ac-quired a scan of Santa Monica Bay the U.S.Geological Survey (USGS) had producedin October 1996 with a multi-beam echo-sounder, a device that showers the oceanfloor with sound pulses. The returns fromthe pulses render a three-dimensionalsnapshot, similar to a topographic map.From the scan, Fabian winnowed morethan 55 elevations that might be rem-nants of Tompkins’ P-51.

While the multi-beam had good enoughresolution to establish targets, it could nottell the searchers what the targets were.“We used the side-scan to create a betterimage,” explains Gene Ralston. Ralstonand his wife, Sandy, are renowned for theirmastery of the side-scan sonar, which gen-erates high-resolution images of objectson the seabed. The sonar, which resemblesa Sidewinder missile, mounts to the bowof the Ralstons’ 23-foot aluminum skiff.Gene uses a winch to lower the device intothe water until it is hovering about 10 feetabove the bottom. It is coupled to a 1,000-foot cable that relays the sonar data backto the operator. The boat motors slowly,towing the sonar.

In saltwater, “things that might surviveinclude the machine guns, the engine—especially the crankshaft because it is veryhard metal—seat armor, and wheels,”Toulmin says. Because of the scan’s highresolution, says Ralston, “we can detectthings as small as a beer can, and underthe right conditions”—like the ones inthe bay, where the water is very clean andthe packed-sand bottom is smooth for

SEPTEMBER 2010 AIR & SPACE | 27

Robert Hyman helped search for fellow adventurer Steve Fossett. The undertaking

inspired him and other Fossett searchers to create MAST.

RO

BIN

JA

CO

WA

Y/C

OU

RT

ES

Y R

OB

ER

T H

YM

AN

Share this article online at as.hy.pr/mast

miles—“things stand out really easily.” The Ralstons also own a remotely op-

erated vehicle, about the size of a smallbeach cooler, that carries a video camera.If the sonar picks up something promis-ing, Gene can deploy the tethered ROV toget a quick peek at it. But the ROV has lim-itations—it is slow, and ocean currentsmake it hard to steady—so during theTompkins search, the targets are investi-gated by scuba divers, who make numerousdescents into the 45-degree-Fahrenheitwater. By the end of the first day, divershad found a 1950s wooden powerboat, ananchor, and a pair of washing machinesfull of lobsters. So far, no Mustang.

Because MAST cannot take every cold

case, it focuses on the most promisingcandidates. For the oldest cases, eyewit-ness reports are essential. But for more re-cent incidents—those in the past 10 or 15years—technology plays a larger role. Be-fore taking a case, MAST members wantto know whether anyone in the missingairplane carried a cell phone, and whetherits data are still available. Because cellphones must always be ready to place acall, they maintain reception by regular-ly emitting pings to nearby towers, a pro-cess that is tracked and recorded by ser-vice providers. MAST’s Tim Evinger, thesheriff of Klamath County, Oregon, and

the head of the privately funded Fossettsearch, used his skills in cell phone foren-sics to help solve the Cessna case. One ofthe two people aboard the aircraft hadbeen carrying a cell phone; Evinger cor-related data from the service provider withone of many unidentified aircraft radartracks in the region. The association helpedMAST narrow the search area.

Radar tracks made minutes before a crashcan provide vital clues to the aircraft’s gen-eral vicinity. The problem, says Evinger, isthat radar data isn’t always archived.

Emergency locator transmitters—andnewer devices called personal locater bea-cons and SPOT Personal Trackers—cantell a satellite your location within a few

yards. Data emitted from any of these gad-gets can lead searchers to a missing air-craft. But pilots are not required to carrythem.

Evinger muses about a day when air-planes and passengers are so wired thatgetting lost simply won’t be possible. Inthe future, he says, our activities will al-ways leave an electronic trail.

DAY TWO OF THE SEARCH. Two findsare intriguing: The first is a general avia-tion aircraft from which divers recover aninstrument panel. (It was later identifiedas part of a Cessna 210C. Both occupants

survived the June 1973 crash in the bay,and MAST interviewed them.) The secondare drainage plugs from an airplane fueltank. They have part numbers, and MASTis continuing to research them.

In seven days, 12 divers, reaching depthsup to 270 feet, clear 44 targets. They findboulders, orange highway cones, lobstertraps, a sailboat, a mysterious metal box,and a 30-foot-tall telecommunications an-tenna. Gene Ralston conducts a secondpass with the side-scan sonar, ruling outthe remaining targets.

MAST did not locate the Mustang. Is itpossible the searchers missed it? MAST’sHyman has doubts: “Divers always say thatitems on the ocean floor tend to displace

current and sediment deposits, leavingthem exposed, if large enough—like theT-33 plane we located.”

But Rikk Kvitek, director of the SeafloorMapping Laboratory at California StateUniversity at Monterey, e-mails me thatin Santa Monica Bay, there has been “sig-nificant deposition of fine sediments inthe 1900s. This could easily cover and/orobscure the low-relief wreckage of a smallaircraft.” Pete Dartnell of the USGS in Men-lo Park, California, has measured the depthsof Santa Monica Bay, and agrees: “This is adynamic environment with the potentialto bury small wreckage.”

28 | AIR & SPACE airspacemag.com

Left: The ruins of Fossett’s Bellanca Super Decathlon. Below: A photo taken by hikers shows

a burning Cessna 182 (orange dot in circle) relative to findable landmarks forming a triangle.

LE

FT

: R

EU

TE

RS

/MO

NO

CO

UN

TY

SH

ER

IFF

'S C

OU

NT

Y S

AR

; R

IGH

T:

CO

UR

TE

SY

RO

BE

RT

HY

MA

N

MAST’s Colleen Keller thinks it is “high-ly likely that the wreckage is buried. For awhile we were discussing trying to involveU.S. minesweeping assets to search thenear-shore area for wreckage just beneaththe surface. Deeper water would presentmore significant problems. These are high-ly localized sensors…the veritable needle-in-the-haystack situation.”

It’s possible, too, that the Mustang is ina less likely part of the bay, outside the 60-square-mile zone that MAST, deeming itthe most promising, chose for the search.

Or it may not be in the bay at all. That’sthe theory of 87-year-old Duncan Miller,who dated Tompkins while he was at-tending fighter pilot school. Miller, who

remembers Tompkins as “a very nice,high-class girl” and “very stable,” says, “Itis my feeling that she crashed in the moun-tains east of Los Angeles.” His reasoning:Pilots hate flying over water because anemergency landing is much more diffi-cult, as is survival afterward. Miller’s sce-nario would explain why young FrankJacobs never heard a splash when he

watched that silver airplane fall from thesky. Even so, at the end of the dive, LauraWhittall-Scherfee was grateful to MASTfor eliminating so many targets, saying:“Although Gertrude’s Mustang contin-ues to elude us, you brought us ever clos-er to our target.”

MAST does not promise to solve everycase it takes on. Limited in time, technol-ogy, money, and number of volunteers, itdoes what it can, and if further work looksunpromising, it will move on. The groupis now investigating the case of retiredcommercial airline pilot Court Mumford,who left Aurora State Airport in Oregonon July 7, 2007, in a Sport Cub and neverreturned. Killian wants to look for Carroll

and Ruby Webb and their son William,who disappeared in 1967 in a Piper Chero-kee flying from San Jose, California, to Og-den, Utah. Meanwhile, the Ralstons aremaking preparations to use their side-scansonar in Flathead Lake, Montana, where,in 1960, Captain John Eaheart, a pilot withthe U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, crashed hisGrumman F9F Cougar.

MAST members are always eager to trythe latest wizardry. Lew Toulmin tells meabout NASA World Wind, software that,among myriad other functions, can put asearcher in the cockpit of a lost aircraft,

generating a 3D image of what the pilotsaw along his or her known (or presumed)route before the airplane went down. MASTtested the software for NASA during itsFossett search. “We would take a canyonand we’d be able to see a notch Steve mighthave gone through that isn’t perceptiblejust looking at a map,” Toulmin says.

Gene Ralston looks forward to the nextgeneration of side-scan sonars, which boastfar better resolution. He is also stoked aboutautonomous underwater vehicles, or AUVs,essentially submersible robots that canoperate untethered at virtually any depthwith no input from controllers at the sur-face. They have an onboard computer guid-ance system and collision avoidance sen-sors, and can beequipped with side-scan sonar, high-def-inition video, stillcameras, and imageprocessing software.A team of wreckhunters from theWaitt Institute forDiscovery recentlyused two AUVs tolook for AmeliaEarhart’s Lockheed10E Electra. Theyprogrammed thede-vices to search 7,000linear miles of oceanfloor near Ameri-can Samoa at an av-erage depth of 17,000 feet.

Ralston speculates that future dronescould be used to search for aircraft on theground. Instead of being directed by a con-troller and a joystick, the craft would es-sentially think for themselves. “They couldfly over an area looking for specific colors,like a piece of clothing, and then analyzethe image,” Ralston says.

For now, Hyman has more modestdreams. “The [Tompkins] search still haslegs,” he says, “and we want to go back [tothe bay] with a small footprint”—perhapsone boat, a side-scan, and a couple of divers.The UB88.ORG and Aircraftwrecks.comteams continue the search as well, and nowthe Navy is assisting. But even if P-51 partsare found in the bay, after 60-plus years,any evidence they once bore showing whythe aircraft went down may be long gone,leaving part of the Gertrude Tompkinsmystery still unsolved.

SEPTEMBER 2010 AIR & SPACE | 29

The divers turned up a fuel tank plug (left), still

being researched, and a piece from an airplane

instrument panel. MAST identified the Cessna

210C from which the piece came and located the

occupants, who had survived the 1973 crash.

Watching the bay

dives: Tompkins’

grand-niece, Laura

Whittall-Scherfee.

BO

TT

OM

: C

OU

RT

ES

Y R

OB

ER

T H

YM

AN

; L

EF

T:

RO

BIN

JA

CO

WA

Y/C

OU

RT

ES

Y R

OB

ER

T H

YM

AN

LE

W T

OU

LM

IN