Remains of Missing Plane Believed Found

Searchers in a remote section of Southern Colorado discovered the wreckage of a small plane Wednesday that authorities believe was carrying three San Fernando Valley men--all pilots--when it disappeared over the weekend. No survivors could be seen.

Spotters in an Army helicopter located the single-engine Piper Lance 11,000 feet up a steep, snow-swept mountain in San Isabel National Forest, about 80 miles southwest of Pueblo, said Custer County Sheriff Fred Jobe. The jagged terrain prevented searchers from being lowered from the helicopter to the crash site, but from the air, it appeared there were no survivors.

“It looked like the impact was hard,” Jobe said. “There were no footprints in the snow.”

Three men--Jacob Rahamim, 50, of Granada Hills, Joseph Rosen, 66, of North Hollywood, and Giora Chalamish, 45, of Encino--were believed to be on board.

A recovery team made up of experienced mountain climbers was expected to make its way to the crash site this morning.

According to relatives and authorities, the three men took a commercial flight to Denver on Saturday morning to pick up the turbo-charged Piper, which Rahamim and Rosen had recently purchased. Chalamish, a pilot for American Eagle Airlines--and also Rahamim’s flight instructor, according to Rahamim’s son, Amir Rahamim--went along to help them ferry the plane back to Van Nuys Airport.

“We expected them to come in about 10 o’clock,” said Michael Chalamish, Giora’s father and himself a former Israeli Air Force pilot, before the discovery of the plane. “He didn’t show up.”

A flight plan was not required, and the men did not file one, said Maj. Stephen Blucher of the Colorado Civil Air Patrol, which conducted the search. But before taking off at 2 p.m. Saturday, they checked in with a Denver-area weather service, which informed them that smoother skies could be found by following a route that would have first taken them north, then back southwest, toward Los Angeles.

With that information, Civil Air Patrol pilots from Colorado and Wyoming spent Sunday, Monday and Tuesday searching near the Colorado-Wyoming border--several hundred miles from where the plane was found.

Late Tuesday, an analysis of Federal Aviation Administration radar records showed that the plane had not headed north after taking off, but almost due south, Blucher said, and had disappeared from radar somewhere over the rugged San Isabel National Forest.