Witold Gilarski: The search continues

It’s been ten days since the disappearance of Polish pilot Witold Gilarski, who went missing Saturday 1 March, following a safe landing in the Colombian backcountry during an SRS competition.

Despite daily searches involving a 50-strong team of local police, fire and officials, no sign of the pilot has been found.

In addition, an online initiative, dubbed ‘Project Kiwi’ has been launched using keyboard volunteers to search drone images, as well as a GoFundMe page to pay for this and further search costs.

Since Friday 7 March 260 online volunteers around the world have signed up, searching and comparing areas of interest photographed by drone. Anything flagged up goes to a triage system where’s it’s checked again and verified. Anything with a high probability of being Witold is then passed onto search and rescue teams on the ground. Some leads are being investigated but no sign of Witold has so far been spotted.

Volunteers are continually needed. Anyone interested should first watch this short demo video and join this Telegram group.

“The response has been superb and supportive,” says SRS director Brett Janaway, who set up the GoFundMe page. He initially set a target of £16,000 to cover additional costs beyond the £25,000 covered by Witold’s insurance. To date it has raised £28,000 which has secured a helicopter sweep and a professional drone which was not in the original plan.

The team have not been able to employ satellite imagery due to cloud cover so they have been relying on a drone owned by the local electricity company and sourced by Lucho Jimenez who is co-ordinating efforts on the ground. It’s able to take images to a resolution of 5cm and flies a pre-programmed route. “It’s more accurate than satellite,” says Brett, “but it needs to do more sweeps.”

Brett says he’s still hopeful that Witold can still be found alive. “It’s one of the hotter parts of Colombia. However it’s been raining most days, there are plenty of rivers, it’s not thick jungle – you can see people. I can envisage he’s near water, staying hydrated and in the shade. That’s the best case scenario.”

Witold’s tracking stopped just 20 minutes after launching on the fifth task of SRS Ozone Edition in Santa Fe, Colombia. His last position was about 3km to the north-west of launch. His tracker showed that he climbed to 2,000m then lost height to 1,650m and seemed to be following a ridge south when contact was lost.

What initially confused organisers is that he called his friends 28 hours later, on Sunday afternoon, to tell them that he had landed safely and was making his way back to civilisation following a dry river bed. The phone cut out before he was able to send his position. Nothing has been heard since. “There’s still hope,” adds Brett. “But as each day goes by, it gets less hopeful.”

Project Kiwi is a company set up by Seattle based data scientist Michael Thoreau named after “Kiwi” Johnston, who went missing while on a paragliding XC flight in Nevada on 22 August 2020. Despite concerted efforts, it was almost a month before his body was discovered. Thoreau and various friends including Frazer Wilson, Chris Drabble and Andy Read were in the process of beta testing a platform that would allow online volunteers to search collated drone and satellite imagery when Witold’s disappearance was announced.