Jules F. "Buzz" Mier Jr.

Lead pilot for Papillon Grand Canyon Helicopters, born and raised in Rayne, Louisiana.

He began flying in the Army, graduated in the top ten of his class, and went to Vietnam, where he flew more than a thousand combat hours and was decorated several times for heroism.

Afterwards he was posted to Fort Rucker in Alabama and spent nearly twenty years there as a flight instructor with the Advanced Instrument Division, teaching American pilots and pilots of the Euro-NATO allied countries. For ten of those years he also flew with the 1133rd Medevac air ambulance unit of the Alabama Army National Guard at Montgomery and Mobile.

He raised his two children in Alabama and joined Papillon in March 1996 to fly tours over the Grand Canyon. He flew power line contracts, work for Arizona Game and Fish, commercial film charters, and at the last the Columbia recovery for the Texas Forest Service.

His chief pilot said he was an extremely precise man - that if you asked him a question he would say let me get back to you, and then come back with a mound of graphs and charts. What drew him to the search was the discipline of it: hours at a time in the air, flying a two-mile grid along lines marked thirty feet apart.

At about half past four on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of March the Bell 407 lost power and went down in the Angelina National Forest in San Augustine County. He and Charles Krenek were killed. Three men behind them lived - Matt Tschacher of the Forest Service, Richard Lange of United Space Alliance and Ronnie Dale of NASA.

His daughter Renée, his son Stacy and daughter-in-law Misty, his grandchildren Cori and Jordan, and his sisters Julene Foreman and Nancy McHale.