Companies still searching for missing plane

Stabroek News, Guyana BY Staff

The three companies responsible for bringing the missing US registered aircraft to Guyana are continuing relentlessly in their efforts to locate the plane and its three occupants as their representatives continue to search the Cuyuni area where the plane went missing.

Even though they have had no luck weeks after the plane went missing, Nancy Chan-Palmateer, Vice President, Investor Relations of U3O8 Corp has told Stabroek News that despite no new developments the ground search was ongoing.

She said that the Dynamic Aviation aircraft equipped with Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology which appears to be able to map the terrain below the jungle canopy and which joined the search early last week, continued to map “both the wider survey area and do… more detailed scans of narrower target areas.”   This, she said, was expected to continue into next week.

Progress by ground and in the air remains slow given the rugged terrain and weather,” Chan-Palmateer said.

“It will continue to take time to review the thousands of aerial photographs taken to date, and new images to come in, in hopes of providing some guide to locating the missing aircraft and the three men.”

After fifteen days of searching the Guyana government called off the search for the missing plane stating that the three occupants must be presumed to have perished. However, the three companies with whom the men on the plane were employed will continue the search.

Americans James Wesley Barker, 28, and Chris Paris, 23, the Captain and First Officer, respectively, along with Canadian Patrick Murphy, a geophysics technician were on board the plane. The aircraft was chartered from Dynamic Aviation Inc by Terraquest Ltd to conduct geophysical surveys on behalf of Prometheus Resources (Guyana) Inc, a subsidiary of the Toronto-based U3O8 Corporation. The aircraft was scheduled to operate in the Chi Chi-Imbaimadai area in Cuyuni for four hours thirty minutes, following which it was expected to have returned to the Cheddi Jagan Inter-national Airport.

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12/4/08