Lori Love

[skydived19006 4]

I just got this email regarding Lori Love A-004998, B-010229, C-011463, D-007663:

Gentlemen -

We regret to inform you that Lori Love has come up missing on a ferry flight from Accra Ghana to Namibia.

If any of you have any information about how we could service Lori and her father, Loren E. Fred, we would appreciate any input you could give us.

With much sadness,

Steve Hall



Lori had been employed lately ferrying aircraft around the world. Her aircraft disappeared without a trace, no transmitions, elt, etc. and for these flights are highly equipped.

Lori started skydiving in the 1970s in Kansas at Sky Sports. Lori had AE, AI, I, IADE, IADI, IE, TE She let them all expire in 1998 due to back/spine problems. She had worked at drop zones all over the country, had ran airports, and DZs. There are people all across the country that knew her, and who's lives were touched by her. Please spread the information to anyone who knew her.

Martin Myrtle
Air Capital Drop Zone
Wichita Kansas

Experience is what you get when you thought you were going to get something else.

AC DZ

[SkydiveJack 1]

This really hit me hard and I haven't even seen Lori in probably 20 years. She is a wonderful person.

Please post any updates you receive.

[skydived19006 4]

http://www.ksn.com/news/local/9324827.html?video=YHI&t=a

http://www.kansas.com/news/story/155595.html

Wichita pilot, plane missing in Africa
BY MOLLY MCMILLIN
The Wichita Eagle

A search is continuing for a Wichita pilot who has gone missing in Africa.

The pilot, Lori Love, disappeared the evening of Aug. 17 after stopping to refuel in the Ghanaian capital of Accra. Ghana air traffic control tried to contact the plane about an hour after it took off and asked another aircraft to try to establish contact. Neither attempt was successful.

Love was flying a 1997 A36 Beech Bonanza for an aircraft delivery company, Wings of Eagles. The company, based in Tampa, Fla., used to be located in Wichita.

Steve Hall, the president of Wings of Eagles, said Wednesday that Love was en route to Windhoek, Namibia, to refuel before traveling to Cape Town and then to her final destination, Stellendosch, South Africa. Hall is a native of Wichita.

The search is continuing but has been made more difficult because there is no emergency signal coming from the aircraft's electronic locating transmitter, Hall said. There also is no signal from a hand-held signaling device Love carried with her.

Love, 58, has nearly 15,000 flight hours, including about 3,000 hours in helicopters.

She has completed about 4,000 parachute jumps, flown jump planes and crop dusters, and is a Southwest Region Aerobatic Champion, Hall said.

In addition, she holds flight instructor certificates in single- and multi-engine aircraft, helicopters and gliders.

"She's one of the best stick-and-rudder pilots I've ever seen," Hall said. "She's just a crackerjack pilot."

Love also delivers aircraft for Wichita-based Pilot International. She most recently completed a trip to India for the company, Hall said.

She also has taught emergency medical training for Butler County College and is completing a doctorate in special education, he said.

Experience is what you get when you thought you were going to get something else.

AC DZ

[Zing 2]

This was on the wire this morning. Lori is quite a character and I always enjoyed running into her over the years.
I spent 6 months flting aeromag surveys in Ghana and traveled some in the surrounding countries. There's a lot of space there that is difficult to search.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that she'll turn up.
Digg del.icio.us AIM print email
By JENNIFER KAY
Associated Press Writer
MIAMI --
The first few hours of silence after Lori Love's plane disappeared off west Africa weren't too worrisome.
The "lone wolf," as she liked to call herself, didn't like mid-air chatter. She had asked for this solo flight through long stretches of sky not covered by radar.
She exchanged a cheerful, routine radio transmission with another pilot about an hour after taking off from Accra, Ghana, last Friday night, said Steve Hall. A longtime friend, he had hired her to ferry a single-engine Beechcraft from Florida to South Africa.
That was the last time anyone heard from Love. Ghana air traffic controllers failed to establish contact with her about 15 minutes later. Her expected arrival in Windhoek, Namibia, late Saturday morning passed without her wheels touching down.
Most troubling: The ace pilot and skydiver never activated a handheld emergency beacon that would have tipped rescuers to her location by GPS, Hall said.
Search efforts from several African countries have stopped tracing her expected flight path, failing for almost a week to find any sign of her plane or her emergency raft, Hall said.
Love would not have taken off from the Ghanian capital if she hadn't been confident her plane was fine, Hall said. A minor electrical problem in the plane's alternator switch had been fixed during a brief layover in Accra, and she had 18 hours of fuel to bridge the nearly 2,300 miles south to Namibia.
"Something catastrophic must have happened," he said. It's not known whether the electrical glitch resurfaced, or if it was part of some fatal problem.
"I'm just praying she will reappear and give me hell and say, 'You gave me a lousy airplane,'" he said.
---
If it flew, Love knew how to keep it in the air. The 57-year-old Wichita, Kan., woman was certified to teach flying and skydiving, rig parachutes and fly helicopters, gliders, single- and multi- engine planes that could touch down on either land or sea, according to Federal Aviation Administration records.
Never staying in one place too long, she logged 15,000 hours as a pilot, and completed 4,000 parachute jumps before a bad back made her give up skydiving in 1999, her colleagues said. Love also ran her own airport in Alabama for five years before feeling the itch to move again.
She kept her late 1970s Dodge Maxivan rolling, too - 555,000 miles and counting, Hall said, tuned with a set of tools at least as old as the vehicle.
"Everything I own is inside it," Love told a National Air and Space Museum photographer for a 1997 book about women pilots. "I honestly thought by now I would be tired of that lifestyle and be ready to settle down, but it hasn't happened."
She had a couple scrapes: a brief marriage after college; a tangle with power lines that dumped her crop duster upside-down in a cotton field. Nothing she couldn't walk away from.
Love wasn't a daredevil child, but it was hard to keep her on the ground once she picked up skydiving at the University of Kansas, said her father, Loren Fred.
She once parachuted off a utility pole in Oklahoma, he recalled. She also dropped tools from her helicopter to lumberjacks in Alaska, and defied a chauvinist crop duster in Arizona.
"He wasn't going to hire a woman pilot, but he consented to put her in a plane and in the most difficult positions and see if she couldn't get out of them," Fred said. "She did, and she got the job."
Love recalled in the book "Women and Flight" that she couldn't remember how she figured out girls could fly; her family didn't have a television, but they would drive by the Wichita International Airport to see the taxiways lit up at night.
She later learned that flying eased the strain of scoliosis on her back, her father told The Associated Press.
"That was a relief, really," he said.
After years of moving around the country, Love settled for a time in Gainesville to pursue a doctorate in special education at the University of Florida. Three years ago, she gave up her studies and returned home to Wichita to care for Fred, 95, when his health began to fail.
Love had just started ferrying planes again, commuting from Kansas to Tampa whenever Hall had work for her. She wanted to make enough money so she could take time off this winter to finally finish her dissertation, her father said.
---
Hall looks for a special breed of pilot for the international aircraft delivery company he runs out of Tampa: eccentric, mountain climbing-types who can handle flying alone nonstop for nearly a day at a time to remote air strips.
Love's independence made her perfect for the job, Hall said.
"She didn't like to travel with people," he said. "When she didn't call the other pilot after one hour, that's Lori. She didn't want to talk to you."
They had worked together on and off since 1978, and she called him up eight months ago looking for work ferrying aircraft again.
She asked for the long flights to India and Russia, even Afghanistan if he'd let her. Hall trusted her as "a good stick," and knew she wouldn't check in with other pilots more than necessary.
On her last job, she had hopscotched from Tampa to Maine, the Azores, the Canary Islands and then Ghana over eight days. She wanted to make it to Capetown, South Africa, in just one more jump after Ghana, but Hall persuaded her to add the brief rest in Namibia. Heading there, she disappeared.
"Her biggest fault was she was a lone wolf," Hall said. "If she had been coordinating with the other pilot, we might have had some insight (into her disappearance)."
Love lived for the adrenaline rush of flying, but she left nothing to chance back on the ground. She always left a note that began, "In the event I don't come back...," on a counter in her apartment, detailing instructions for taking care of her ailing father and beloved 22-pound cat, Jeda, friends said.
"It was kind of a school-teachery thing. She was very organized like that," said Judi Ladd, a fellow UF graduate student in Gainesville who has been entrusted with Love's cat.
Love, who had no children, looked after those who couldn't defend themselves, friends said.
A vegetarian, she doted on animals, volunteering to round up feral cats in Wichita, where she had been piloting skydiving trips over the past year.
"It was kind of interesting to see her around the airport. She looked like somebody's grandmother more than a pilot extraordinaire," said Martin Myrtle, owner of Wichita's Air Capital Drop Zone.
Love was pursuing her special education doctorate so she could advocate for the severely handicapped, Ladd said.
Love had recently double-checked with Ladd to make sure she was OK with being listed as Jeda's caregiver. She wasn't worried about the long trip, Ladd said.
"She had done that run at least once before," Ladd said. "To her, it was pretty run-of-the-mill, just back and forth."
Associated Press writer Kwasi Kpodo in Accra, Ghana, contributed to this report.

Zing Lurks

[pomiak 5]

I admired Lori Love. She was one of my jump pilots at Air Capital DZ in Wichita. Although only as an aquaintance as my jump pilot, I've heard of her accomplishments; and I admired her even more so. Whenever she would fly our DZ's Cessna 182 as the jump pilot, I would occasionally sneak a peek and try to understand her karma.
Like many adventure-seeking people, she was seeking God -- and that's God with a capital "G". Why else was she not afraid to take on tasks that would scare most people? She believed and KNEW that there's something better. Yes, she might have gone through the initial pain of self-preservation; but, afterwards, she knew it could be part of her destiny that she had long visioned.
God bless you, Lori.

[Jumper519 0]

I only met Lori a few times, but I remember the first time very well.

We showed up at the Dz on an iffy weather Sunday morning. We soon discovered our pilot was not one of our regulars. Actually she looked like she could almost be somebodys grandmother, only with a bandana. Great! Gotta train another one. Boy was I wrong. But you would never here it from Lori.

Who knew she had all that knowledge, experience, ratings, jump numbers, flying hours, and just life experiences. Yes, she would tell you about it if you would get her going I think, but she would not toot her own horn.

I'm pretty sure she was more comfortable in the air than having feet on the Planet.

That morning she dodged the weather and clouds skillfully with great spots. The last jump of the day, as we climbed out onto the strut of the 182, we hit that phantom little rain shower. My wife and I looked at each other and then inside to Lori. She looked at us like...Well, you gonna get the hell off my airplane or what? So we did.

Man, rain really hurts! No matter how small.

But I think thats the way she rolls. Here I am. This is what I'm here to do. This is what I got to work with. This is what I'm going to do. And there ain't no looking back.

If there is any possibility that someone could make it out of this situation, Lori would be the one to do it.

God Bless her and her family and friends. Lets all pray there will be closure for everyone real soon.

[hobie331 0]

Quote

I only met Lori a few times, but I remember the first time very well.

We showed up at the Dz on an iffy weather Sunday morning. We soon discovered our pilot was not one of our regulars. Actually she looked like she could almost be somebodys grandmother, only with a bandana. Great! Gotta train another one. Boy was I wrong. But you would never here it from Lori.

Who knew she had all that knowledge, experience, ratings, jump numbers, flying hours, and just life experiences. Yes, she would tell you about it if you would get her going I think, but she would not toot her own horn.

I'm pretty sure she was more comfortable in the air than having feet on the Planet.

That morning she dodged the weather and clouds skillfully with great spots. The last jump of the day, as we climbed out onto the strut of the 182, we hit that phantom little rain shower. My wife and I looked at each other and then inside to Lori. She looked at us like...Well, you gonna get the hell off my airplane or what? So we did.

Man, rain really hurts! No matter how small.

But I think thats the way she rolls. Here I am. This is what I'm here to do. This is what I got to work with. This is what I'm going to do. And there ain't no looking back.

If there is any possibility that someone could make it out of this situation, Lori would be the one to do it.

God Bless her and her family and friends. Lets all pray there will be closure for everyone real soon.

That was August 21, 2005. Mitch and I exited right after you and Kim. I was on jump #64.
What an awesome pilot, what an awesome lady. When you would take the time to just sit and visit with her, she could teach alot. But yea, no tootin' her own horn. I hope I get to talk with her again.

It's a gift, I don't try to explain it.

[jdpml 0]

Febuary 13th 1995,finally found Skydive city,got some sleep and woke up to do the first jump course on the 14th. My instructor was a lady called Lori Love.
After spending most of the day in the classroom got the pleasure of doing level one with her.I spent the next two weeks jumping and trying to learn,not a very good skydiver me,but I had a lot of encouragement from Lori ,spoke quietly when she thought I needed it and could raise it a notch when I was in need of that as well.
When I became a aff I in 98 much of her demeanour stuck in my mind.
Very cool lady and I feel that it was a stroke of luck having her to guide me as a new student at that time.
Only met her once after that, (around 2002 i think),told her what I was doing now (still jumping) and she smiled as if to say "knew you would be"
Very nice lady,I hope her father will be ok in this time of need.
Paul Meagher.

[DFWAJG 4]

Has Lori been found yet?

[Patti Johnson 0]

Does anyone have any information yet about the 2007 disappearance of Lori Love?