Philippine Air Force OV-10. FILE PHOTO BY ERWIN MASCARINAS
The two Philippine Air Force pilots missing since the OV-10 Bronco aircraft they were flying crashed off Palawan Sunday night may not have been able to eject and could still be inside the downed plane's fuselage, the chief of the military's Western Command said Wednesday afternoon.
“That’s a possibility. They could be inside the fuselage,” Commodore Joseph Rustom Pena said of Major Jonathan A. Ybanez and 1st Lieutenant Abner Trust Nacionin, in a phone interview just hours after a private contractor hired by the Air Force to conduct a sonar search of the area where the plane went down "detected" something on the seabed.
Pena said the Cebu-based M/Y Sakura, which conducted the sonar search, has still to give an official report of what its crew detected earlier in the day.
Earlier, Commander Carlo Lagasaca, skipper of the Navy’s BRP Mangyan (AS71), which has been leading the search for the downed plane and its crew, said the Sakura "has already requested a buoy and divers, meaning they detected something big under the sea.”
Pena said the Navy and Coast Guard continue to scour an area three nautical miles by 10 nautical miles.
“Ito ang mahirap, kasi (This is the difficulty, because) we cannot pinpoint the specific crash site. So all we have to do is to scour that far,” Pena said.
Pena reiterated earlier statements by military spokesmen that the two pilots are likely dead.
“While we’re waiting the official assessment from the Western Command, we will continue searching for the two pilots and fuselage. Well, the standard 48 (hours') critical time for any survivor had lapsed. It’s been three nights, you know,” Pena said.
The downed OV-10, one of two codnucting a "night proficiency flight" on Sunday, went down some five nautical miles off Puerto Princese City as it was making its landing approach.
The Air Force has grounded all its OV-10s since the incident.
http://www.interaksyon.com/article/64951/bronco-crash-update--pilots-could-be-trapped-in-downed-planes-fuselage---westcom-chief
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