SYDNEY N.S. - Friends and family of a Calgarian missing in a small plane believed to have gone down off the coast of Nova Scotia have gathered on the East Coast waiting for word.
Dennis Forgeron, CEO of Calgary-based Forent Energy Ltd., is one of two missing Calgarians after his newly purchased Cessna 414 vanished just before it was scheduled to land Thursday.
Forgeron, a married father of three in his 40s, purchased the small aircraft days before, officials say. He hired a Calgary pilot, an unidentified man in his 50s, to fly him to Sydney, N.S., after picking up the small plane in Buttonville, Ont., on Thursday.
Forgeron is a native of Cape Breton who grew up in Sydney, said Harvey Vardy, regional supervisor of Maritime Search and Rescue.
Lt. Edward Stansfield from the Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre Halifax confi rmed the two Calgarians lost contact in their eight-seater plane after leaving Ontario and approaching a landing strip in Sydney.
"They were very close to their intended destination when we lost contact," Stansfi eld said.
The aircraft was descending to land around 11:30 p.m. when it veered off course severely to the north, about seven nautical miles off shore, and lost radar contact.
As the search continues, some of those who know Forgeron are holding on to hope that he has survived.
"I still am praying, because I do until I know that there's no hope. I'll pray that we will see him again," said Brett Wilson, who invested this spring in Forgeron's company and has known the man for five years.
"I'm just waiting on pins and needles."
Wilson said Forgeron was a skilled pilot who was in airplanes every weekend, flying all over Western Canada.
"I know he had a passion for small aircraft and he was an accomplished expert in everything that he tried to do," he said.
Coast guard ships, fishing vessels and airplanes are searching for the missing airplane.
"There's no debris, no oil, none of the telltale signs we look for," said Stansfield.
"All things seemed relatively normal, then they lost radio contact and veered off.
"There's no beacons, but we have a very good sense of our last sighting of them on radar."
The weather was "horrendous" with fog, zero visibility and thunderstorms, and Stansfield said the unfavourable conditions prevented a Cormorant helicopter and a Hercules plane from being deployed from CFB Greenwood to search overnight Thursday.
"Reports are that the pilot was very experienced," said Vardy.
Both aircraft joined the search just after 7 a.m. Friday morning near Sydney, about 400 kilometres northeast of Halifax.
Search and rescue crews are focusing on the region where officials last received communication from the plane.
Forgeron graduated from Memorial University in Newfoundland with a bachelor of science and bachelor of engineering in 1991.
He owned and operated several small private oil and gas companies and pursued wind power development projects in the Pincher Creek area through Energreen Canada Corp.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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