At 10:50 a.m. Tuesday, a dispatcher in Farmington picked up an automated phone call detecting a crash.
Through the open line, she could hear someone asking for help. She couldn’t get the person to respond. She had GPS coordinates but didn’t know yet what had crashed or exactly where.
What followed was a 46-minute struggle through rugged terrain in the western Maine town of Avon. That’s how long it took first responders to reach game warden Joshua Tibbetts after he crashed his plane into the trees, according to a Bangor Daily News analysis of emergency radio transmissions.
At one point, a warden could see the crash site from the air but was having trouble directing authorities to an unnamed road nearby. By the time authorities got there, Tibbetts was dead.
“The rural nature of it absolutely is going to hinder our ability to respond,” Phillips Fire Chief Sean Allen, whose department covers Avon and led the search, told the BDN. “It’s not on a public access roadway. It was through and past a gated access.”
The wreckage was found near Schoolhouse Pond, a densely wooded area not accessible by road. In the area, it’s hard to tell what is an all terrain vehicle trail, a real road and a logging road, Allen said.
The initial alert didn’t specify a plane. It was an automated crash detection from a smartphone. The first assumption was a car or ATV. Phillips fire got its utility terrain vehicle ready and drove as far as full-size vehicles could take them, staging at the end of Dustin Road at 10:57 a.m.
By then, a minute after the GPS coordinates came in, they knew where to go but didn’t know how to get there.
Ten minutes after Phillips was dispatched, the Maine Department of Public Safety flagged an aircraft emergency signal. Five minutes after that, dispatchers confirmed it was a Maine Warden Service plane that went down. Moments later at 11:05 a.m., dispatchers reported there was still rustling from the open emergency line. That was the last reported sign of life in Tibbetts’ plane.
As the search formed in Avon, Temple and Farmington fire were called in just after 11 a.m. to approach from the Day Mountain Road side, providing another angle when no one was certain which path would get them there fastest. By 11:10 a.m., the first UTV left the staging area.
They still had more than three miles of rough logging roads to get to the crash site. It took about 20 minutes on UTVs — faster than if they were in a pickup truck, which they learned could have made the drive, Allen said.
Another warden happened to be in the area stocking fish and flew overhead to find the crash from the air at 11:21 a.m., circling over Schoolhouse Pond and radioing down what he could see: an unnamed tote road, northwest of the pond, that could get rescuers to the site.
On the ground, responders found a road that looked like it had been logged in the last couple of years and used it to push through. Then they hit the end of the road for UTVs.
They had to hike about 100 yards up a “steep hill” to finally reach the crash. Tibbetts was on a hill that had roughly 1,500 feet of elevation.
It was “very difficult to access,” Allen said.
When they reached the scene at 11:36 a.m., Tibbetts, 50, was dead.
He had worked as a Maine Warden Service pilot for just over two years and had been with the service for 18 years. He was flying solo, helping fisheries officials stock waterways, tracing a looping flight path over the forests he had spent nearly two decades working.
A federal investigator reached the scene on Wednesday. State officials said there was no indication of a distress call or medical emergency. Mark Latti, a spokesperson for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, referred a reporter to the National Transportation Safety Board for details about Tibbetts condition after the crash, but the NTSB said that information comes from local authorities.
“I will not speculate on his condition preceding, during or after the crash,” Latti said. “Our focus remains on assisting in the investigation and respecting the privacy of his family, friends and coworkers during this incredibly difficult time.”
