HILO, Hawai'i — A conservation crew camping and working in an isolated area of Ka'u last week gave the Big Island Fire Department the tip it needed to solve the five-day mystery of a missing tour plane, and helped guide a helicopter rescue crew to the wreckage and three bodies early yesterday morning in a thick hapu'u forest on the southeastern slope of Mauna Loa volcano.

The work crew members were unaware a plane was missing when they boarded their helicopter flight off the volcano Friday morning after a weeklong camp, but reported they heard a plane traveling through the area Tuesday, and noticed its engine abruptly went silent.

Rescue crews had been searching since early afternoon on Tuesday for an Island Hoppers tour company Cessna 172 piloted by Katsuhiro Takahashi, 40, and carrying two passengers, Japanese tourists Nobuhiro and Masako Suzuki, 53 and 56.

The Island Hoppers tour flight failed to return from what was supposed to be a 2 1/2-hour tour flight traveling clockwise around the Big Island from Kona. The flight was last seen over the shoreline where lava from Kilauea volcano enters the ocean, but never returned to the Kona airport.

Big Island Fire Chief Darryl Oliveira said the plane was found shortly before 6 a.m. in four or five pieces in a compact crash site at the 5,200-foot elevation in a remote area of the Ka'u Forest Reserve. One of the bodies had to be removed from the wreckage, and all three were then lifted out by helicopter and taken to Hilo Medical Center.

The crash was about 8 1/2 miles northwest of Punalu'u Beach and about 8 1/2 miles west of Pahala, Oliveira said.

CHOPPER PILOT SPOTS IT

Helicopter pilot David Okita, who flies for the Fire Department, said searchers were just beginning their search grid yesterday morning when they spotted the crash site.

"I just made one turn and started tracking about a half-mile and saw the break in the forest and the debris trail, and the aircraft wreckage was right there," Okita said. Part of one wing was lodged in a tree, and the remainder of the wreckage had knocked a path through the trees about 3 yards wide and 15 yards long, he said.

"It plowed down a little chunk of forest and the majority of the aircraft was intact," he said. Okita estimated the plane traveled 40 yards to 50 yards after striking the first tree, and said he saw no evidence of a fire.

"Relative to the whole forest it was really small, but it was appropriate for the kind of damage that aircraft ... flying into the forest would make," Okita said. "It was not a significant swath taken out. You could conceivably blink and miss it if you were flying by."

RESCUERS LOWERED

National Transportation Safety Board investigator Jim Struhsaker said vog and heavy clouds over the forested crash site prevented him from walking the site yesterday, but five rescue workers were lowered to the site from helicopters to collect the bodies and photograph the wreckage before the weather closed in.

The airplane was upside down amid hapu'u ferns that were four to 10 feet tall, with a canopy of trees above them ranging from 20 feet to 40 feet tall, so "it was a rather difficult environment," he said.

Struhsaker said he will move the wreckage as soon as possible.

The aircraft was headed generally west, and Island Hoppers officials have indicated their pilots sometimes use a similar route to cut across Mauna Loa's southwest rift zone instead of flying a longer route along the coastline around South Point, Oliveira said.

Struhsaker said he does not know yet what the weather was like in that area Tuesday afternoon, but fire officials reported their efforts to search that area were hampered almost every day last week because of a regular weather pattern that brought heavy clouds into the higher elevations.

Okita, the pilot who finally found the wreckage, was also the pilot who picked up the Nature Conservancy work crew that reported hearing the plane. He said he and the Fire Department took the tip very seriously because the plane was heard about the right time, and "it would be really uncommon to hear aircraft in the area knowing what the weather was like in that area at the time," Okita said.

Fire crews searched the general area around the campsite Saturday, and yesterday finally found the wreckage less than two miles from the camp, he said.

U.S. Coast Guard and county fire crews never detected the plane's emergency locator beacon, but Struhsaker said the devices can fail because of crash damage.

FAMILY MEMBERS BRIEFED

Oliveira said family members were not taken to the crash site or the county command post on an old cane haul road about four miles from the crash site. A staging area for the aircraft was also set up in a high meadow approximately one mile from the crash site to accommodate recovery crews.

The Suzukis' 20-year-old son, Kosuke Suzuki, and his uncles, Shigeru Araki and Toshihiko Yamada, were briefed by county officials yesterday afternoon. The pilot's wife and his mother, whose names were not released yesterday, were also briefed in a separate meeting.

Family members declined to speak with reporters after the meeting, but Yamada — Nobuhiro Suzuki's brother — issued a statement through a county spokeswoman thanking county rescue workers for their efforts.

"We are very grateful to the Hawai'i county authorities for having done such a thorough job of looking for the family members over the past five days, even hiking up the mountain on foot from early in the morning," he said in the statement.

County spokeswoman Janet Snyder said, "After all this time has passed, they didn't really expect to ever learn the whereabouts of family members, and they're very grateful to know at least what happened to them."

An autopsy on the bodies of the pilot and passengers has been tentatively scheduled for tomorrow to determine the exact cause of death.