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2 aviators missing over Gulf of Mexico

Two naval aviators are missing after a T-34 Mentor training aircraft disappeared over the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday afternoon, a Navy official said.

The Coast Guard is leading a search and rescue effort along the Texas coast. The plane was last reported near Port Aransas, about 75 miles north of Corpus Christi, said. Lt. j.g. Brett Dawson, a spokesman for Chief of Naval Air Training, based at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi.

The single-engine turboprop plane was on a routine training mission when it lost touch with air traffic controllers about 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, Dawson said.

A spokesman for the Coast Guard could not immediately be reached for comment.

T-34s are used by all student aviators during their initial phase of instruction. The two-seater planes typically carry a student aviator and an instructor.

All aviators wear a parachute and a vest with survival gear, which includes a radio, a flotation device, flares and mirrors, Dawson said.

The T-34 does not have an ejection seat. In emergencies, aviators can manually release the canopy and jump out of the cockpit, Dawson said.

Naval Air Training experienced a spike in mishaps in 2007 and 2008. Five training planes crashed during the nine-month period between September 2007 and May 2008, Navy records show. Nobody was injured in the five mishaps. All five of those aircraft were T-45 trainers, which are used to train students to fly jets.

Two of those crashes were caused by birds. Corpus Christ and the Texas gulf coast, where the Navy conducts many student training flights, sits along a heavily populated migration route for birds flying from the northern U.S. and Canada down to Mexico.

As a result of the bird strikes in 2007 and 2008, officials with Naval Air Training Command installed a land-based radar system designed to tell pilots about any birds in the landing strip area.