Mystery surrounds U-M student's final flight

Gina Kaufman | Detroit Free Press

Investigators pushed through the dense bush and snow, 3 feet deep in some places, looking for the wreckage.

Once there, they studied the crash site in the dense Ontario forest nearly 500 miles north of Ann Arbor. They saw snapped trees, and the right wing of the Cessna had been knocked off. The plane was out of fuel. The passenger-side door had been opened.

Search and rescue had already been there. They found no one in the small plane — and no footprints in the snow.

The pilot, a University of Michigan doctoral student from China, was nowhere to be found.

“All we had was an empty airplane,” said Peter Rowntree, a senior investigator with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada.

Officials have said they think Xin Rong, 27, jumped from the plane at some point during his March 15 journey, which left out of the Ann Arbor Airport and crashed in a thickly wooded area northeast of Munising over Lake Superior, near Manitouwadge, Ontario.

Authorities said it was an apparent suicide, but would not elaborate.

Meanwhile, Rong's body has not been found. He is listed as a missing person, and answers to many questions remain elusive.

University officials are tight-lipped. Written questions submitted to a U-M spokesman about Rong's well-being were not answered, and classmates and professors in the School of Information, where he was pursuing a doctorate, have either declined to talk or did not return messages.

Officials have said the decision not to comment is out of respect for Rong’s family. The university took down a profile of Rong from the School of Information’s website at their request.

“We very much respect the wishes of the family,” U-M spokesman Rick Fitzgerald said.

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Club member

More than three years ago, on Feb. 11, 2014, Rong flew solo for the first time in a Cessna 152 owned by the Michigan Flyers, which describes itself as a nonprofit flying club based out of the Ann Arbor Airport.

“Congratulations Xin!” the club included under a list of achievements on its website.

The site also said Rong “finished his private pilot check ride under the threat of rain” in May that year and noted: “Xin’s mom, who was visiting from China, had the honor of being his first passenger the next day.”

Rong attended Tsinghua University in Beijing and, in 2011, started seeking his PhD at the University of Michigan, keeping busy along the way by interning for Microsoft in 2016 and for Google in 2013 and 2014, according to his LinkedIn page.

A personal webpage for Rong at U-M, which appears to have been taken down, said his research “stays in the center of human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, natural language processing.”

His listed career objective on LinkedIn: "assistant professorship OR industrial lab position.”

His page and a Twitter account in his name display a mixture of posts about academia, musings on life — “I just saw the most beautiful shooting star ever in my life” — and occasional deliberations about the mental health of students.

An archived snapshot of his personal page in late 2016 included this: “I have just recently realized that the ratio of depression among doctoral students might have been significantly underestimated. The academia does not have to be this way. Every single doctoral student should be happy. I think this problem has already caused tremendous negative impact on the overall productivity of academia, and undermined the wellbeings of the students and taxpayer dollars.”

A similar thought was expressed in an October 2016 tweet: “Academia should definitely promote wishful thinking. When I snap out of depression, the whole world just changes … It’s so beautiful.”

And then last Christmas: “To gain infinite imagination and joy, one must embrace the finiteness of life, meaning, world, and the universe.”

Flying seems to have been one way Rong embraced life.

Andy Fowler, vice president of the Michigan Flyers, said Rong was a certified pilot.

"I love taking friends up for sightseeing flights," Rong's personal U-M webpage said, adding he had done flight tours of the Detroit River, San Francisco Bay and Puget Sound.

Fowler, who said the club rents aircraft by the hour, said there was little he could share about Rong, but he offered that the young man “was a beloved member of the club.”

The post on the club's website after his February 2014 solo flight said Rong is from a city in northeastern China "where many Chinese military pilots receive their preliminary training."

"He admired these young pilots very much, and now he gets to fly a plane on his own.”

Search begins

The day Rong went missing — March 15 — he flew out of Ann Arbor with a charted destination of Harbor Springs, an investigator said. When the plane — a red, white, blue and gray 1984 Cessna 172P — was overdue for its return, authorities were notified.

The wreckage was located in the forests of Ontario just before midnight, and search and rescue technicians parachuted in, said Acting Staff Sgt. Peter Leon, a spokesman for the Ontario Provincial Police.

Rowntree, with the TSB, said the crash site was about 475 miles from the Ann Arbor Airport.

The would-be rescuers found no occupants in the plane nor footprints in the snow, said Evan Koronewski, a spokesman with Canada’s Department of National Defence.

The Ontario Provincial Police sent members of its Northwest Region Emergency Response Team to search the area. With no luck, the pursuit was suspended March 17, Leon said. Investigators with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada then flew in by helicopter.

Rowntree said he and another investigator were dropped in a clearing and picked their way for about 300 yards to find the wreckage. They saw freshly broken trees.

“We knew we were on the right path,” he said.

Once at the site, they surveyed the damage to the plane, which Rowntree said was relatively intact.

Though investigators could not determine conclusively whether the autopilot had been engaged, Rowntree said they believe it had been because of the relatively straight track the plane had taken. He also said the latches on the passenger-side door were telling.

“The door had been opened from the inside,” he said.

Rong's face is now emblazoned on a flyer, posted to a missing persons website, that describes him and asks anyone with information to contact police.

Last month, Diane Brown, the spokeswoman for U-M’s Division of Public Safety and Security, said the missing person investigation was still open. In an e-mail Sunday, she said there was "nothing new for public release."

Rowntree said in his years on the job, having investigated upward of 100 plane crashes, he has never seen one like this.

"I've never had an accident where I didn't have anybody at the accident," he said.

Leon, of the Ontario Provincial Police, called the case unique.

“I’ve been doing this for 29 years and I can honestly never recall an investigation of this nature, where an aircraft has been located without … a pilot or an occupant of some sort,” he said.

Though the search for Rong was suspended, Leon said if anything is found, police will send in resources.

The family is still looking for their loved one, he said.

“These,” Leon said, “are very troubling and trying times for them."

Contact Gina Kaufman: 313-223-4526 or gkaufman@freepress.com