PILOT HIKES 9 DAYS OVER SIERRA AFTER CRASH December 10, 1994 RICHARD SIMON and MARTIN FORSTENZER | SPECIAL TO THE TIMES


Survival: A Long Beach man, ragged and bruised but otherwise OK, walks into a cafe in Inyo County, AZ. Searchers are led back to the plane, where two passengers are found dead.


A Long Beach pilot missing with two companions since the Thanksgiving weekend survived a plane crash in the frigid High Sierra and trudged for nine days across miles of mountainous terrain before showing up Friday at a cafe in Inyo County. His two passengers were later found dead.


Peter DeLeo, 33, scratched, weary and wrapped in ragged ski clothes--showed up at the Ranch House Cafe in Olancha, about 200 miles north of Los Angeles, almost two weeks after his single-engine plane vanished over the steep, high-altitude backcountry of eastern Tulare County.


“Do you believe in miracles? Well, you should now,” said Lt. Col. Sidney Wolfe of the Civil Air Patrol. “They make


movies about this stuff.” Just a few hours later, DeLeo boarded a plane and led searchers back to the downed plane, which they found in a ravine at the 8,000-foot level near Kern Peak in Inyo County, about 20 miles west of the cafe on U.S. 395. His companions were found dead, in and near the wreckage.


“I asked him how he survived,” said Bill Woodward, manager of the Lone Pine Airport. “He said ‘sheer determination.’


“He stayed on the sunny side of the mountains” during the day, Woodward said, adding that DeLeo traveled above the tree line in hopes that searchers would see him. “He kept bundled up in the brush at night . . . (and) he ate snow,” Woodward said.


“We figure he walked 35 to 40 miles, given the terrain,” said Cpl. Scott Stell of the Inyo County Sheriff’s Department.


2001 DITCHING OF PC-12 N660AR On 8 July 2001 PC-12 N660NR ditched off Russia in the Sea of Okhotsk. According to the NTSB: The pilot reported…that the aircraft was established in cruise at 8,100 meters altitude when he felt a vibration


followed by a rapid increase in the engine’s Turbine Temperature Indication (TTI). He reported that the TTI reached 1144 degrees during which there was a compressor stall. He shut the engine down, feathered the propeller, and initiated a power off emergency descent.


During the emergency descent the pilot radioed a mayday on 121.5 MHz, set his transponder to code 7700, and manually activated the emergency locator beacon. The aircraft descended through multiple cloud layers during which the pilot and passengers prepared for the ditching.


The pilot reported that upon breaking through the bottom of the last overcast layer, at 100 feet above the water, he encountered swells of approximately 8-12 feet height. He ditched the aircraft on the crest of a swell and the aircraft came to a stop floating in an upright, level attitude. All four occupants exited the aircraft through the main cabin door into a life raft. Over a period of several hours the occupants lost sight of the floating aircraft and after about 15 hours they were picked up by a Russian container ship and airlifted to Sakhalin Island.


The pilot in that case, Michael Smith, reported that he… …and his passengers had immersion suits to help retain body heat, but their low-cost life raft had only a single


flotation tube on the sides, so waves kept coming over the top. They had to keep bailing it out for about 15 hours with a collapsible bucket. “When night fell, [we experienced] hypothermia within a few hours,” he recalled.


A passing vessel discovered Smith and his companions in time to save them. “We were very, very lucky,” he said. “If I’d been trained, I would have had a better life raft and more equipment, such as a satellite phone and GPS.”


7 Survival, Search and Rescue


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