Date: 3/6/2009
By RACHEL JONES
Associated Press Writer
CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan rescuers are still searching for a small plane flown by a U.S. missionary that vanished two weeks ago in the jungles of southern Venezuela, an official with the country’s civil aviation agency said Thursday.
Rescue coordinator Gilberto Gonzalez said officials called off aerial searches several days after the plane disappeared amid stormy weather on Feb. 16, but continue to work with as many as 80 indigenous volunteers who are searching the jungle for wreckage.
“We haven’t stopped looking,” Gonzalez said. “We’re waiting to hear from people on the ground, and trying to work with the resources that we have.”
Robert Norton, a 48-year-old missionary from Bryant, Alabama, had six passengers aboard, including his wife Neiba, missionary Gladis Zerpa, and two adults who were accompanying two sick children he was taking from a hospital to their villages in Venezuela’s remote southern state of Bolivar, said David Gates, a friend of the pilot.
Gates, who is president of Tennessee-based Gospel Ministries International, said the Bolivar state governor’s office loaned rescuers a helicopter, and that friends and family members had asked for help from the Canadian government, which has used its satellite system to track emergency signals from past plane crash sites.
Gates said Norton’s father, Elwin, was also a missionary who died while piloting a plane that crashed in Mexico 29 years ago.
“What makes this thing so painful is that his father was killed with his passengers when he went down in the jungle too,” Gates said. “His mother lost both her husband and a son the same way.”
Nytta Norton of Bryant, Alabama, said she doubted her son would be found alive, but that she trusted God to “see a bigger picture.”
“It’s as though the jungle has just swallowed them up,” she told The Associated Press. “I hope they’ll find them alive and OK. But it has been so long, the chance of that is pretty slim.”
Norton and his wife lived in a village outside the town of Santa Elena, a sparsely populated area of forests, grasslands and plateaus. He provided emergency medical transportation to remote indigenous villages for more than five years as director of Adventist Medical Aviation Venezuela, part of the McDonald, Tennessee-based Gospel Ministries that Gates runs.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.