Police searching for pilot who left suicide note

Police on Sunday were searching for a pilot in training who left a hand-written suicide note before taking off, and then stopped responding to control tower calls during a training flight.

The note was found by his girlfriend who called the police for help, Ynet news reported. In it, the missing pilot reportedly requested that his doctor, who is also an adviser in the field of alternative burial, be contacted if something happened to him.

“He was a good and quiet man,” a colleague of the missing man told Ynet news, adding the pilot had once been injured in a parachuting accident and as a result was paralyzed in both legs. “Today he went flying after me, and then I understood he had vanished.”

According to reports in the Hebrew media, the young man took off from the Ein Vered landing strip in the center of Israel around 7:30 a.m. Shortly afterwards the control tower lost contact with him and his Drifter Ultralight aircraft, which is capable of flying for four hours without refueling.

Searches were being conducted in the Mitzpe Ramon area for remains of the plane. An unnamed officer told the Hebrew news site police didn’t know “where he was flying to.”