Aug 23, 4:51 PM EDT Kansas Woman's Plane Missing Over Africa By JENNIFER KAY Associated Press Writer U.S. Video Multimedia Hope for Children With AIDS in Africa America's Africans Latest Africa News U.N. Chief Calls for Sudan Troop Removal Sudan Expels Top Canadian, EU Diplomats Ailing Sudan Rebel Chief Can Go to Kenya AU: Africans Can Make Up Darfur Force Egyptian Girl Dies in Circumcision Buy AP Photo Reprints MIAMI (AP) -- The first few hours of silence after Lori Love's plane disappeared off West Africa didn't come as much of a surprise to those who know her. The "lone wolf," as she likes to call herself, doesn't like mid-air chatter. She had asked for this solo flight through long stretches of sky not covered by radar. A longtime friend, Steve Hall, had hired her to ferry a single-engine Beechcraft from Florida to South Africa. She exchanged a cheerful, routine radio transmission with another pilot about an hour after taking off from Accra, Ghana, last Friday night, Hall said. 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 time 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 for the nearly 2,300-mile flight 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 flies, Love knows how to keep it in the air. The 57-year-old woman raised in Wichita, Kan., was certified to teach flying and skydiving, rig parachutes and fly helicopters, gliders, single- and multiengine planes that could touch down on land or sea, according to Federal Aviation Administration records. 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 never stays in one place too long, but she ran her own airport in Alabama for five years before feeling the itch to move again. She keeps 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's had a couple scrapes: a brief marriage after college, a tangle of 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." Flying also 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, Fla., 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 just started ferrying planes again, commuting from Kansas to Tampa whenever Hall had work for her. She wants 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 kind of pilot for the international aircraft delivery company he runs out of Tampa: those who can handle flying alone nonstop for nearly a day at a time to remote air strips. Love's independence makes 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 have 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 trusts her as "a good stick." 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 Cape Town, South Africa, in just one more jump after Ghana, but Hall persuaded her to add the brief rest in Namibia. Heading there, she disappeared. Love lives for the adrenaline rush of flying, but she leaves nothing to chance back on the ground. She always leaves a note that begins, "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 schoolteacher-y 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 is a vegetarian and dotes on animals. She volunteers 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 is pursuing her special education doctorate to advocate for the severely handicapped, Ladd said. 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.
