Search Resumes for Body of Houlton Pilot Who Crashed on a Western Maine Mountain Forty-Four Years Ago

UPDATE: The Bangor Daily News is reporting searchers have found the wing of a yellow airplane, but it's from a Cessna 180 that crashed in 1962.

Searchers in Maine are looking for the wreckage of a small plane that went missing in a storm in 1972.

The plane was piloted by 28-year-old Billy Hogan Jr. of Houlton, who was flying home from Connecticut on May 2, 1972.

Hogan was returning from Danbury, Connecticut to Aroostook County on the maiden flight of a new yellow-and-black single engine Citabria

He was scheduled to land at Houlton International Airport but communication was lost between Kennebunk and Augusta at about 8:15 AM. The last known contact with flight N11655 was with controllers at the Brunswick Naval Station.

Investigators believe a Civil Air Patrol Beacon in Augusta was out of service that day and Hogan would not have been able to pick it up. Hogan was advised by Brunswick to follow a  a route which would have taken him past Mount Waldo in Frankfort.

Searchers this  morning set out from Anderson's General Store in Frankfort to hike up the more-than one-thousand-foot Mount Waldo overlooking Penobscot Bay, where a hiker who got separated from her family on a trail in the late 1970s says she saw a large depression and plane engine.

Diane White says her fear of being lost overcame her curiosity and she left the site to find her children. Her family moved out of state and she never reported her find. But in January, White says she saw a Bangor Daily News story about Jerome Hogan's search for his brother's plane and realized it could be the same plane.

The Downeast Emergency Medicine Institute and Old Town Aviation Explorers Post 787 are partnering to search for the wreckage.

Aerial searches are also being conducted.

Interestingly, The DEEMI plane being used for the search is also a single-engine Citabria.

There is also a Facebook page dedicated to the Hogan plane mystery