Navy search crews along with law enforcement agencies and others Friday evening reached the remote site east of Mount Rainier where a Navy Growler that had two aviators aboard crashed Tuesday.
Crews included about 30 members of the Army’s 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord. The methodical search, near Goose Prairie, Yakima County, involves an expansive area, as personnel evaluate debris and hunt for information in the snow-covered wilderness, according to the Navy.
“Finding the aircrew continues to be our primary focus,” read a Navy news release announcing that searchers had made their way to the crash site. On Thursday, the Navy described the jet wreckage as being about 6,000 feet up on a steep mountainside.
The EA-18G Growler crashed Tuesday afternoon during a training flight, and authorities located the wreckage a day later. It was deemed unreachable by motor vehicle.
The cause of the crash remains under investigation.
The aircraft is from Electronic Attack Squadron 130, known as the “Zappers.” The squadron returned in July from a combat deployment on the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Southern Red Sea, Bab el-Mandeb Strait and Gulf of Aden, according to the Navy.
For Tim Thompson, the roar of Growlers is a familiar sound, but Tuesday afternoon, he heard an unfamiliar one, like the “crack” of a hammer on his metal roof, he said.
Since buying his Goose Prairie home in July to renovate into a vacation rental, the Prosser, Benton County, chiropractor said he has grown accustomed to hearing the Navy jets zooming above at about 500 miles per hour. The aircraft, which usually pass Thompson’s property about once a day, are a welcome sight to the former Air Force navigator and commercial pilot.
“Whenever we hear them, we always run out to watch,” Thompson said in a phone call Friday. “It’s a cool thing to see up there because it’s our own private air show.”
Thompson, his partner and a pair of contractors heard the unfamiliar sound as they worked on the flooring of his home on the east side of Mount Rainier shortly before 3:30 p.m.
They ran outside to look but not seeing anything unusual, they went back to work, figuring the noise came from a hunter shooting nearby. Thompson said he didn’t think of the sound again until hours later, when he learned of the Growler crash.
Thompson expected the Navy to announce within hours that they had found the aircraft and the two missing aviators. When he didn’t hear anything by 2 p.m. Wednesday, he called Yakima County Search and Rescue to tell them about the sound he’d heard Tuesday. The person who answered his call said rescue teams had just discovered the Growler wreckage near Pear Butte, about 5 to 10 miles from Thompson’s property, he said.
Learning that the aviators were still missing worried Thompson, who reflected that afternoon on his years in the military and as a pilot.
“Everybody is going to be worried about those pilots because you become like brothers and sisters when you work together and train together every day,” he said. “Even though you sign up for it and you know what you’re getting into, you never expect something like that to happen.”
(Seattle Times staff photographer Nick Wagner contributed to this report from Yakima County.)
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