Ex-Official, 2 in Family on Missing Plane : Search: The Thousand Oaks residents were returning from Utah. Former Planning Commissioner Kenneth Harrison was the pilot.

A former Thousand Oaks planning commissioner, his wife and their youngest daughter have been missing since a plane they were flying from Utah failed to arrive at Camarillo Airport on Sunday as scheduled.

Nearly three dozen pilots from the volunteer Civil Air Patrol on Thursday scoured a rugged 17,000-square-mile area in eastern Utah searching for pilot Kenneth (Reed) Harrison, his wife, Judith, and their youngest daughter, Julie.

Harrison served as planning commissioner from 1984 to 1987 before running unsuccessfully for City Council in 1989, officials said. His daughter, Julie, the youngest of three girls, was senior class president at Westlake High School last year and is enrolled at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., for the fall, friends of the family said.

Relatives reached at the family’s home in the Westlake area of Thousand Oaks declined comment.

But Civil Air Patrol spokeswoman Lt. Debra Wiecken said the family was returning from Roosevelt, Utah, in the northeastern part of the state, where they had been visiting relatives.

In a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza plane piloted by Harrison, the three took off from Roosevelt Municipal Airport about 4 p.m. Sunday and were expected to land at Camarillo Airport at 8 or 9 p.m., Wiecken said.

Harrison, an experienced pilot, didn’t file a flight plan detailing his route before taking off, which has complicated the search, Wiecken said.

His craft disappeared from radar screens after the plane passed over a mountainous area near Price, a town about 60 miles southwest of Roosevelt.

Because of the rugged terrain around Price, planes flying over the area commonly disappear from radar screens, she said.

“It doesn’t mean an aircraft’s gone down,” she said. “It’s highly possible that he had to put the plane down and is just waiting for somebody to find them.”

Wiecken said family members have outlined the path that Harrison generally followed in his frequent flights between Camarillo and Roosevelt.

Since Monday morning, volunteer Civil Air Patrol pilots from California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado and Utah have taken turns flying over the entire 65,000-square-mile flight path area, searching for signs of the beige and brown plane, Wiecken said.

The Civil Air Patrol, an auxiliary of the Air Force, has 60,000 members nationwide who conduct search-and-rescue missions throughout the U.S. About 35 pilots searched the area around Price on Thursday.

But Wiecken said the searchers will turn their focus to other areas between Roosevelt and Camarillo on Friday and over the weekend, when the patrol probably will intensify its search because most of its members will be off work and able to join the effort.

In the past, the volunteers have continued searches for as long as three weeks, she said. “We don’t call them off until there is good reason to call them off.”

Mayor Judy Lazar, who served with Harrison on the Planning Commission, described him as a dedicated family man and civic leader.

“He is a person who has been involved, who cares about the community,” she said.

Harrison has also been instrumental in raising money for the planned Westlake High athletic stadium, said Meribeth Freeman, the student government adviser at the school.

Freeman, who said she knows the entire Harrison family, called Julie Harrison “giving, caring, perceptive, exuberant, one of those girls with just a beautiful, beautiful smile.”