Pentagon Stumped By Missing Plane

Wednesday April 9 5:43 AM EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuter) - Defense officials said Tuesday they had no clues on what may have happened to a bomb-laden Air Force A-10 plane and its pilot missing since Wednesday, but played down suggestions that it disappeared mysteriously.

"I don't think anybody at this point has a good enough idea of what occurred with the aircraft to have come up with any kind of a theory as to what might have caused it to go missing," a spokesman, Capt. Michael Doubleday, said.

Doubleday turned aside questions on whether the plane could have been stolen or disappeared in some mysterious way, saying the military only knows it is missing.

He said a U-2 spy plane has flown over southern Colorado where witnesses said they believed they heard it and the U-2 photographs were being analyzed.

Maj. Joe Lamarca, a spokesman for the Air Force Air Combat Command, said later that clouds obscured the area and the U-2 could not get good photographs but would try again Wednesday.

The tank-busting A-10 Thunderbolt disappeared last Wednesday while conducting a training exercise with two other A-10s over a training range near Gila Bend, Ariz.

Doubleday said he did not believe the other two pilots were able to say what might have happened to the missing plane.

Rescue workers have been unable to find either a crash site or confirm that the pilot used a parachute to escape.