Cleveland jet search illustrates difficulty finding planes in water

The search of Lake Erie for a small jet that took off from Cleveland a week ago is a reminder of the difficulty finding aircraft that crashed in water – more than a half-century after a larger, four-propeller airliner disappeared over the Great Lakes.

City, state and federal officials have been searching since Dec. 29 for a Cessna 525 Citation business jet that took off from Cleveland Burke Lakefront Airport with six people aboard.

The Coast Guard suspended its search Dec. 30 after helicopters spent 20 hours scanning 128 square miles of water for wreckage.

More than 120 pieces of debris have been recovered, some of which were linked to the plane, according to city and airport officials. The search continues for major items, such as the cockpit voice recorder and the engines, which could help investigators determine why the plane crashed.

Seven boats with four dive teams were searching 12 square miles of Lake Erie's nearly 10,000 square miles Tuesday. Divers descended to check suspicious items as small as a soda bottle. But high winds and waves hindered the effort Wednesday.

“We’re going to continue searching until we find something,” said Khalid Bahhur, airport commissioner. “I’m hoping we can find a big piece.”

While extremely rare, scores of airliners have gone missing despite the advent of much more sophisticated technology.

The Aviation Safety Network counts 84 planes, each with at least 14 people aboard, that have gone missing since 1948, typically over oceans, mountains or other remote areas. Another six planes with nine to 13 people aboard, eight military maritime patrols and five corporate jets also went missing during that period, according to the safety network.

The search continues for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared March 8, 2104, with 239 people aboard. Australia, China and Malaysia hired crews to conduct a painstaking sonar search for the Boeing 777 in a section of the Indian Ocean floor the size of Pennsylvania.

Closer to home, Northwest Airlines Flight 2501 disappeared in a thunderstorm over the Great Lakes on June 23, 1950, with 58 people aboard. The Douglas C-54 crew on the flight from New York to Seattle asked air-traffic controllers for a different altitude while flying over western Michigan but was rejected in order to keep distance from another flight, according to the Civil Aeronautics Board report about the crash.

A Coast Guard cutter found an oil slick and debris such as luggage and foam cushions floating on Lake Michigan about 18 miles northwest of Benton Harbor the next day. Divers said the water was about 150 feet deep, with a layer of silt and mud about 30 feet deep where debris was found.

“The cushions and arm rests, shredded from impact forces and cutting edges of the fuselage, indicated that the aircraft struck the water at high speed,” the board report said. “From the evidence available, there are no definite conclusions to be drawn.”

Technology aboard airliners and even smaller planes has become much more sophisticated to track and find aircraft after accidents. For example, planes have emergency beacons to help locate wreckage.

"The crude technology and lack of even an approximate location made finding it very problematic," Al Diehl, a former crash investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, said of the Northwest search. "Today the new sonar technology and robotic systems should make locating the missing Citation relatively easy."

Fred Szabo, interim director at the Cleveland airport, said searchers have heard some signals that could be from the Citation’s emergency beacon but haven’t been able to isolate the signal yet. The NTSB is sending equipment expected to arrive Thursday to detect the cockpit-voice recorder, which could in turn help reveal the rest of the wreckage.

“You have to understand that there are a lot of objects on the bottom,” Szabo said. “If it looks suspicious, we’ll dive on it. So we’ve seen rock formations, things of that type.”

The Citation has been a relatively safe family of aircraft. It won the Collier Trophy for its outstanding safety record in 1985.

“The Citation has got a great safety record,” said Diehl, who helped design the aircraft’s cockpit while working for Cessna from 1969 to 1971.

Spotty information is available about the location of the relatively low, slow-moving plane. The flight was tracked by three radar points, the last of which was traveling at 278 mph about 2,100 feet off the ground and heading downward at 3,750 feet per minute, according to FlightAware.com.

“It may be intact,” Diehl said. “If localized within 12 square miles, you could find it fairly quickly. That’s not a backyard size, but that’s localized enough they ought to be able to find it.”

Joining the search were fire crews from Akron and Toledo, Cleveland metropolitan park rangers, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and New York state police.

Clues continue to drift in. Cleveland police are combing the lake shore after finding debris in areas near 170th Street and 104th Street, according to Michael McGrath, Cleveland’s director of public safety.

“We’re going to continue searching until we find something,” Bahhur said.