|
At 1 p.m. on May 19, 1978, Lon Amason took 3 friends, Thomas Beaudry, Edward Demski, and Bill Mountz in a rented Cherokee from Fort Pierce, Florida. Originally, Amason had listed Miami as his destination, but the lure of the tropics no doubt caught their imagination and they headed to Nassau,
Bahamas.
Fifteen minutes later Amason reported himself as 20 miles east of Stuart,
Florida.
“If I pass this thunderstorm to north of us here, I see a clear spot. Will
it be clear the rest of the way to Freeport?”
The sector controller replied: “Okay, you’ve got a band
there . . . you probably see it . . .it’s lying northeast-
southwest and it’s uh about eight to ten miles across
and once you go south of that it looks like a fairly
large break into the Freeport area. But you do have quite
a bit of activity south which is moving to the north about
10 knots . . .so you’re gonna have some circumnavigating
to do no matter which route you take over to Grand Bahama.”
“Affirmative,” acknowledged Amason. “I see a spot here just
about due east of my position. It’s clear through there.”
He then diverted course to the clear area and signed off.
His last words strike a somewhat dramatic chord to the concluding
words of the investigation into his subsequent disappearance. “There
were no further communications with the flight. Search efforts by the
Coast Guard produced negative results and an accident is presumed that
resulted in fatal injuries to the occupants.”
|
