-company still hopeful of locating it
IT is now just over five months after the Beech King Air N87V survey aircraft all but vanished into thin air while flying over the jungles of Guyana and to date there has still not been a sign or sighting of the airplane or its three member crew.

In an invited comment recently, Vice President, Investor Relations, Nancy Chan-Palmateer of U3O8 Corp. the company conducting uranium explorations here in Guyana, , stated that the search has not been abandoned and her company and the two others involved, namely Dynamic Aviation and Terraquest Limited, continue to hope to locate the missing aircraft and the remains of its crew.

Chan-Palmateer said that since the beginning of this year a number of nominations arising from the image review were investigated by ground teams without any sign of the men or plane. 

“At the end of February, a methodical ground search of the original area of interest was initiated.  The teams have been moving systematically through this roughly 16-square kilometre area for over a month now” she informed the Guyana Chronicle. 

Both the image review and ground search continue, the U3O8 Vice President said.

The company had, late last year, identified the first of many anomalies during the review of the photographs taken during previous aerial surveys, and this had triggered renewed aerial searches for the aircraft and crew, who are listed as Americans: Captain James Wesley Barker, 28, and First Officer Chris Paris, 23, as well as Canadian Patrick Murphy, a Geophysics Technician.

However, aerial surveys by one of the Guyana Defence Force’s Bell 206 helicopters, upon the request of U3O8 Corp’s CEO, Richard Spenser, revealed that what was believed to be the tail fin of the plane was actually a dead tree stump with extended branches.

The GDF had rejoined the aerial search efforts which had been called by Minister of Transport and Hydraulics, Robeson Benn, some two weeks after the November 1 incident, when the aircraft failed to respond to radio calls while flying over the mountainous Mazaruni region.

The Army had collaborated in the renewed search with the Guyana Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and had also reopened the Rescue Coordinating Centre at Timehri which had been closed.

Although the aerial and specified ground searches had been called off and the crew presumed possibly dead or lost, local scouts had continued with some ground searches, but that too yielded nothing.

Since then, U3O8 Corp, Dynamic Aviation and Terraquest Limited, had taken over the search for the airplane and its crew, to no avail.

The Toronto-based U3O8 Corp company, through one of its subsidiaries, Prometheus Resources Incorporated, had contracted Terraquest Limited to conduct the geographical surveys, which had in turn chartered the U.S. registered aircraft from Dynamic Aviation Inc to carry out the surveys for uranium deposits near Chi-Chi Falls and Imbaimadai in Guyana.

U3O8 Corp was granted a one-year extension on the company’s reconnaissance permits for uranium exploration in Guyana by the Government in September of last year, which give the company exclusive exploration rights for uranium in about 1.3 million hectares within the Roraima Basin and adjacent basement in this country.

The company now has until November 23 this year for their reconnaissance of Area A, and for Area B, until May 31 next year.

Meanwhile, earlier this year, Chief Executive Officer of U3O8 Corp, Richard Spenser revealed, through a press statement, that an independent consulting firm had completed a resource estimate for the Aricheng North and Aricheng South structures, located in the basement near the Roraima Basin in Guyana.

According to Spencer the firm found that there is an indicated resource of 5.8 million pounds of uranium at an average grade of 0.10 percent, along with an additional inferred resource of 1.3 million pounds of uranium at an average grade of 0.09 percent.

Spencer, said that the initial resource estimate is an important milestone and marks first of its basement – hosted uranium targets to advance to resource definition.

“Mineralization at Aricheng South and Aricheng North remains open for expansion, and further drilling has the potential to considerably increase this initial resource figure” he said.

He stated that the focus now is on determining whether other mineralized structures in the Kurupung Batholith can contribute to a significantly larger uranium resource.

Other firms had conducted explorations in Guyana for uranium deposits over the years, without success, but given the rising demands now for clean nuclear energy in developed countries, exploration here has resumed.

In the last 50 years, uranium has become one of the world’s most important energy minerals.