FRANKFORT — The search for a Houlton-based pilot who went missing after his plane disappeared on a stormy day nearly 44 years ago resumed in force this past weekend, centered on Mount Waldo in Frankfort.
The effort was prompted by a tip from a Bar Harbor woman who believes she came across remnants of a plane wreck when she got lost while hiking on the mountain several years later, according to organizers of the search.
Members of the Downeast Emergency Medicine Institute and Old Town Aviation Explorers Post 787, a development program for youths interested in aviation careers, partnered to search for the wreckage and possible remains of pilot Lewis “Billy” Hogan Jr.
Hogan was 28 years old and working for LISAir when he left Danbury, Connecticut, at 8:15 a.m. May 2, 1972, in a brand-new, yellow-and-white single-engine Citabria. He was expected to land at Houlton International Airport later that day, but communication was lost somewhere between Kennebunk and Augusta. Search crews never found his remains or any trace of the plane.
Malcolm Brydon, who is a coordinator with the Aviation Explorers, said last week that in 1978 or 1979, Bar Harbor resident Diane White, who used to live in Frankfort, was hiking on Mount Waldo with the intention of seeing the wreckage of an old seaplane that crashed into the top of the mountain in the 1960s.
While she was hiking down the mountain, she got lost and came upon the wreckage of another plane that she believes could be Hogan’s plane.
“Her memories are very vivid, and she even drew us a map,” Brydon said.
White hadn’t thought much about her finding until after the BDN wrote in October 2015 about a renewed effort by Hogan’s brother, Jerome Hogan of Bangor, to find the plane and his sibling’s remains.
Brydon said a search party that included White and Jerome Hogan went up Mount Waldo last weekend without success.
We “hiked up a little way to see if she could retrace her steps, but that area has changed a lot over the years. She described how the engine was separated from the fuselage and how it was almost sitting on a cliffside. There are a lot of cliffs up on that mountain, so it would be hard to find that plane.”
Brydon said it was indeed possible Billy Hogan flew the coastal route and came into contact with Mount Waldo.
The pilot was using a type of short-range radio navigation system known as VOR to determine his position and keep the aircraft on course. The system works by receiving radio signals transmitted by a network of fixed ground radio beacons, but on the day Hogan disappeared, the beacon at the Augusta airport was out of service for about four hours, according to the Maine Civil Air Patrol.
According to news accounts at the time, authorities believe Hogan got lost after he unsuccessfully tried to switch from the Kennebunk VOR beacon to the Augusta beacon as he was flying north.
That theory “would put him right in that scenario,” Brydon said of the possibility the plane crashed on Mount Waldo in Waldo County.
Jerome Hogan said Tuesday he couldn’t believe the news after all these years.
“Wouldn’t that be something if that was my brother’s plane?” he remarked. “I just couldn’t believe it, after all of these years. I am getting hopeful, and I am glad that this woman came forward with these memories.”
The students who are in the Explorers Post have sent Freedom of Information Act requests out to the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies that might have been involved in the initial search for Hogan, trying to get all the information they can about his last flight, according to Brydon. They are using that information to reconstruct cockpit conditions, as well as the conversation between the cockpit and the control tower, to help establish search parameters.
