Family grieves for lost son half a world away

In a small house in India tonight, a father will remain haunted by thoughts that his only son lies somewhere in the Everglades, alone in the darkness with nothing but muck and alligators, his family 8,800 miles away.
As he has done every night since his son’s plane crashed into another above the swamp Saturday, Christopher Alvares will say a prayer from the other side of the world for 25-year-old Cleon. He will remember what his boy said about one day flying back to Mumbai from Lantana, taking his father up into the clouds, and showing him what the world looked like from up high. Today, Christopher Alvares will leave India for the first time, make his way to that murky corner of the Everglades, and, he hopes, fly his son back home.
“I want my boy to be found,” Alvares said from his home in Mumbai Wednesday. “If I had known that some day he would lose his life there, I would have never let him go. I need to take my son home.” Cleon Alvares was identified by his flight school, Kemper Aviation, as the student pilot killed on a solo training run from the Lantana Airport Saturday. Authorities have not officially identified Alvares as the deceased pilot, because they have not found his body during their three day search.
Authorities plan to search for his remains today and again on Wednesday. Alvares’ family, though, clings to the hope he might have survived.
Even if his son is dead, Christopher Alvares says, the sheriff’s office must not stop looking for his remains.
“It’s very important that we know for sure,” he said.
Alvares’ sister, Joyce, 21, said the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office should continue looking for Cleon no matter how long the search takes.
“If they had a loved one out there, they would be digging into the swamp until the very last moment,” she said.
Handsome, wavy-haired, and six feet tall, Cleon Alvares left Mumbai, the former Bombay, for Lantana on July 4, looking for his own piece of the American dream. Since childhood, he had hopes of becoming a pilot, of being called “captain.” After getting a degree in information technologies at Khalsa College in Matunga, India, he had studied aviation in Mumbai. Alvares was intensely ambitious, his family said, and wanted to become a professional pilot as fast as he could. So when a representative from Kemper Aviation found him in Mumbai and pitched him on the idea of fast-tracking his training in Lantana, he couldn’t resist. “They told my son they were the best flight school in America,” said Christopher Alvares, who owns a construction business he named Cleon. “They said it would take 10 months. Then he would come back to India, earn a good living, and do well in life.
“My son had big dreams.We dreamed big for him.” Family agreed to pay for Alvares’ education. He flew to America, rented a small room in Lantana, and studied every day, logging more than 100 hours of flight time. Saturday afternoon, he called his mother, Jennifer, just as he always did before taking to the air.
“Please pray for me,” he told her. “God is great.” Alvares, whose family is Roman Catholic, asked his mother to call him that night, after he landed.
But just before 3 p.m., his dream ended some 1,900 feet above the mud and sawgrass of the vast Everglades. His single-engine Cessna 152 collided with a twin-engine Piper piloted by Harry Duckworth III, of Pennsylvania, a veteran pilot who had flown more than 30 years without mishap. Duckworth’s body was pulled from the muck Monday, along with a small piece of what investigators believe might be Alvares’ remains.
The fatal crash was the second in recent months involving student pilots from Kemper, which trains about 90 students, most from India. On Oct. 27, a Piper P-28A took off from Lantana airport and crashed into a golf course west of Boynton Beach, killing instructor Anders Selberg and student Arjun Chhikara and critically injuring passenger Chandrashekhar Godghate. Investigators found an improperly assembled fuel filter amid the wreckage, but the cause of that crash has not been determined.
Chhikara’s father called Christopher Alvares after Saturday’s crash to talk about their sons, and about Lantana-based Kemper Aviation.
“I wish I’d never let him go there,” Alvares said.
A federal investigator is investigating the cause of the crash. He will release a preliminary report within the next week.
Sheriff’s divers have the exceedingly difficult task of looking for remains. They have spent three days wading into fuel-tainted, blackened water, digging their hands into thick mud pierced by jagged pieces of wreckage and surrounded by alligators and snakes. They have combed every inch of the quarter-mile crash zone, but have no way of knowing exactly where Alvares’ remains lie.
“We wouldn’t treat this any other way if it was our family members,” said sheriff’s office spokeswoman Teri Barbera. “We’re doing everything we can.”
“He always wanted to fly high, wanted to do something different so that he could take care of our family,” said Joyce Alvares. “He said to my dad, ëI’ll take you all over the world, through the skies, and you won’t have to work so hard anymore.'”
12/12/07 Kevin Deutsch/Palm Beach Post, United States