Around the Patch: Needle in a haystack

Barber is one of about 56,000 volunteers around the country who help CAP to fulfill its mission of aerospace education, cadet programs, and emergency services. The group, which this year celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary, has a storied history. It was born one week before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. During World War II, CAP members logged more than 500,000 flying hours, during which they rescued hundreds of crash victims and sank two enemy submarines. Since then, CAP has conducted countless searches and rescues, and been mobilized to aid in natural disasters. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, CAP flew some of the first sorties, photographing the damage for the national record and to aid rescue personnel.

While these kinds of roles get headlines, it is the everyday contributions of pilots like my friend Jon Barber that are the real heart and soul of this group. Barber joined CAP in January 2002 as a low-time pilot wanting to build flight hours. He started as a scanner: someone who rides along to look for the target aircraft, vehicle, or person. As he built time on training flights in the CAP Cessna 182 based in Payson, he eventually became a mission pilot, flying the aircraft while others scanned.

Since joining the group 14 years ago, Barber says he has had at least one mission per year. Many of those have been in response to unintentional activation of an emergency locator transmitter (ELT). Pilots make a hard landing, or someone doing maintenance bumps the transmitter, and it goes off—starting the chain of events that leads to a CAP search. With today’s technology, Barber says they usually find the ELT cases pretty quickly, most often at an airport. But not always. “In one case, someone was tracking an ELT signal and found the aircraft on the back of a semi truck going down the freeway,” he says.

Barber also has been on about a half-dozen searches for aircraft or people reported missing, including the one right before Christmas. In that case, an extensive search and rescue operation had already been conducted for the airplane—a Cirrus that never arrived at its destination. CAP had sent aircraft into the grid where it was thought to be located at least twice before Barber’s mission. Helicopters had overflown the area multiple times. There had been no sightings of the airplane after a week of searching. “You’re looking for a needle in a haystack,” admits Barber.

But that day, they found the needle. About an hour after takeoff, Barber got a call from a helicopter that was searching the same grid: They had located the wreckage. Barber’s airplane had flown directly over the top of it shortly before, making it tough to see. He flew to the site and, while the helicopter left to refuel, Barber spent the next 90 minutes circling the position so another helicopter could find it and land.

While not a happy ending, Barber says it is these outcomes that encapsulate why he keeps serving with CAP. “We were able to give that family closure,” he explains. Sometimes, downed airplanes are not found until years later, but on that day, CAP was able to provide a grieving family with some answers.

“CAP is a way for me to serve the public,” Barber says. “It gives me a mission.” And he intends to keep fulfilling that mission, serving others and helping to bring closure to families, for as long as he can.