February 4, 2010 Aerial Search and Rescue

The Liberty Gazette

February 4, 2020

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: The Civil Air Patrol and Texas EquuSearch are well known for their participation in aerial search of missing persons. Often, they use grid patterns to comb an area where it may be especially hard to find a person. Mountainous terrain, forests, and large bodies of water are examples of tough areas to conduct a hunt. The CAP calls their pattern “The Swiss-Army Knife of Search grids.” Their fleet of 560 single-engine airplanes carries pilots and observers trained in aerial search. Their conventional grid system was developed in the early 1960s by CAP members in Washington state, and it was soon adopted nationwide.

A grid is a coordinated system of boxes based on latitude and longitude. The basic premise is to divide the U.S. into 15-minute by 15-minute quadrangle grids. These grids are then numerically labeled sequentially on an aeronautical sectional chart. The order of numbering is from the top left to the top right, down one row, and so on. Each 15-minute grid is approximately 225 square statute miles. When especially difficult terrain is involved, the grid sections can be subdivided into four smaller sections.

These methods hadn’t been thought up yet when, on December 3, 1926, a couple had an argument about the husband’s desire to spend the weekend without his wife. Four months earlier, the man had broken the news to her that he wanted a divorce. And that there was another woman. In December, the distraught wife left their home and wasn’t seen again for eleven days. Her disappearance caused quite a stir. More than 1,000 police officers and 15,000 volunteers are reported to have joined in the search for her. One of them was Dorothy Sayers, author of the Peter Wimsey mystery series. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created the character Sherlock Holmes, jumped in to help. He was a believer in spiritualists, such as psychic mediums, and gave the missing lady’s glove to a psychic in the hopes it would lead them to her.

Linda: This was also the event that brought out airplanes to be used, reportedly for the first time in the world, for search operations. Several airplanes, in fact. They flew over the British landscape, without a sophisticated search pattern, but earnestly looking for clues.

The missing lady, Agatha Christie, was finally found but claimed to have no memory of those eleven days. Some believe she entered a “fugue state” of mind, a rare psychiatric disorder characterized by reversible amnesia for one’s personal identity. It tends to happen from severe stress.

On the upside, she later met a fine gentleman who treated her much better. That leaves about the only nice thing I can say about Archibald Christie being that his cold, cold heart ended up opening the doors for aircraft to be used in search and rescue. I’m sure that wasn’t his intended result, but thankfully, from that time on, airplanes have been used when the need arises for the special vantage point which only they can bring.

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