By now of course anyone interested has heard, but it turns out the missing Twin Otter apparently flew into a mountain, and no on survived. I found that out on Saturday morning-- I pretty much spent the night before refreshing news sites on my phone every ten minutes, so when I woke up at 6:00 I checked and they'd found the wreckage.

Because of the terrain and the time of year, recovery of the crew's bodies is being postponed until October. The cockpit voice recorder has been recovered, so perhaps they can figure out what happened. Speculation is that the plane turned too early on a course through a mountain range.

It was an upsetting weekend-- particularly since, when the crew was only "presumed" dead, I could not shake the stupid hope that maybe... despite the fact that, with no sign of activity around the site, it was pretty clear anyone who survived the initial crash would have died in the elements in the three days they were missing.

One interesting fact: you never, ever look at comments on news stories on the Internet. I know that. They bring out the horrible in human beings.

But I happened to look at a few, and they were, uniformly, people posting to comment that they flew with Bob (the pilot, the guy I knew back in the 80s when he taught my sister to fly and took me along on some courier flights just to be nice to the teenage airplane fan) and what a great guy and proficient pilot he was.

It's a first, frankly. I've never seen so much decency on display in comment sections.

So there we are. Bob Heath, you were apparently just that awesome.