Rodney Collen’s single-engine aircraft went off radar shortly after takeoff from Tacoma Narrows Airport on March 6, prompting an ongoing aerial search over densely wooded territory near the coast roughly 150 northwestern driving miles away.

A secondary radar tracked Collen’s 2006 Cessna T182T Turbo Skylane to an area between the unincorporated community of Queets and Lake Quinault and showed it made a “very rapid descent to the ground,” according to the Washington State Department of Transportation. The search for Collen and his plane, confined to 36 square miles near Queets, entered its 12th day on Friday.

Collen, who was a subject of a News Tribune profile last year as the creator of a mushroom-shaped home on the Key Peninsula, is an experienced pilot, according to news reports. He was only a couple of minutes into his 5:35 p.m. departing flight from the Gig Harbor airport when his plane’s Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast system stopped.

Authorities don’t know whether it…

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