Military

Search and Rescue Continues For Missing Airmen

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published October 30, 2009 at 1:04 PM PDT

This story was published more than 14 years ago.

The Coast Guard is not giving up in its search for survivors of the aircraft crash that occurred off the coast of San Diego last night.

Coast Guard helicopters have come down from Oregon and Los Angeles to help the search and rescue operation. So far there is no sign of the seven crew of the Coast Guard C-130 aircraft or the two navy crew of a Huey helicopter which collided around dusk last night.

Henry Dunphy of the Coast Guard said the weather was calm last night when the crash occurred and is still conducive to survival. The debris field is large and they are searching 650 square miles of ocean.

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"We're still hoping to find some survivors out there." he said, "Obviously it's difficult as we're a small service like this, when we have a plane go down and we're going to keep searching with that hope."

Dunphy said the Coast Guard crew was out of Sacramento but they were quite familiar with the airspace off San Diego and the fact that Navy aircraft often train there.

He said the C-130 left Sacramento at 2 p.m. yesterday and had been airborne for five hours when the collision occurred. They were searching for a boater in a small skiff. A separate search for that boater also continues.

Military

Alison St John

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.