This was on Time magazine online site..I read about this a long time ago, and it may have been discussed here before..anyone know more about this incident??
DESTINATION UNKNOWN
WHAT MADE AN AIR FORCE PILOT BREAK FORMATION DURING A ROUTINE MISSION--AND SIMPLY DISAPPEAR?
BY ELIZABETH GLEICK
By most accounts, Captain Craig Button, 32, was a straight arrow, an accomplished pilot right out of Top Gun who had been flying since he was 15--a young man from New York's Long Island who loved cars, motorcycles and skiing, and who was, as a former college classmate put it, "a follow-the-rules type of guy." He seemed to be the last person anyone would have expected to break formation while flying a routine training mission with two other planes, and an unlikely person simply to vanish into the wild blue yonder with an $8.8 million, bomb-laden A-10 Thunderbolt jet.
But that is exactly what he did at high noon on Wednesday, April 2, 90 min. into an air exercise that left from Arizona's Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. He showed no signs of distress, signaled no one and failed to respond to a radio call from the lead aircraft on the mission. The missing plane, a heavily armored, low-and-slow-flying machine known as the Warthog, emitted no tracking pings because only the lead aircraft on an exercise uses its transponder. But Air Force officials have traced Button's flight 800 miles northeast from Arizona through a corner of northwestern New Mexico up toward Vail, Colorado, where he would have run out of fuel.Because eyewitness accounts indicate that Button was in control of the plane for most of its journey, his disappearance has sparked some wild theories. Among them: that he was planning to drop the 500-lb. bombs he was carrying (which the Air Force believes were not armed) on the Denver courthouse where the Timothy McVeigh trial is under way; or that the rugged Warthog would be a perfect plane to sell to a militia unit. There were reports, on CNN and elsewhere, that Button may have been suicidal because he was upset over the recent conversion of his mother to the Jehovah's Witness faith, which espouses antiwar beliefs. But Button's father Richard, a veteran pilot who flew in three wars, and his mother Joan released a statement on Saturday saying they have both been "active" Jehovah's Witnesses for more than 20 years. Air Force officials say it is more likely that the plane or its pilot was disabled in some way--by a bird hitting the cockpit canopy, for instance, or by a malfunction in the oxygen supply, which might have caused Button to go in and out of consciousness.
The search for the A-10 centers on New York Mountain, a rugged, 12,467-ft. peak in the central Rockies where several eyewitnesses reported seeing fires and smoke and hearing a loud explosion on April 2. Since then, though, several fresh feet of snow have been dumped on the already remote and snowy area, and search aircraft have been mostly grounded by bad weather. But even if the jet is found, some vital information will be missing: the A-10 carries no black box. Investigators may never learn why Captain Button did not radio for help--or why he veered off in the first place.
--Reported by Rita Healy/Denver, Elaine Rivera/New York and Mark Thompson/Washington