GUYANA, SOUTH AMERICA (WVLT) – More help is headed to South America, where the rescue effort to locate a missing East Tennessee man and his airplane are still on going.

It’s been nearly one month a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air turboprop plane with Chris Paris, 23 of Lenoir City went missing about an hour after taking off from an airfield in Guyana. Also on board were James Wesley Baker of Salem, South Carolina and Patrick Murphy, a Canadian geologist.

Paris and Baker are employed by Dynamic Aviation Group, Inc of Bridgewater, Virginia, which operates sub-contracting air services. When they went missing, their aircraft had been chartered to U308 Corp., a Canadian mining company which was using the plane to conduct a geological survey in search of undiscovered uranium deposits.

After the aircraft went missing on November 1st, a large rescue operation was organized by Guyana’s government utilizing British soldiers and the Guyana Defense Force. They spent about a two and a half weeks searching large areas of the jungle by foot and air for signs of wreckage, but the trace they found was a weak signal from the aircraft’s emergency locator beacon. They were unable to pinpoint where it was coming from, and has not been picked up since.

Guyana officially called of their search in the third week of November, but U308 Corp., Dynamic Airlines and some local villagers haven’t given up hope.

On Thanksgiving Day, Nancy Chan-Palmateer, U308 Corp. Vice President of Investor Relations told Volunteer TV News by email that even though progress on the ground has been slowed recently due to rugged terrain and bad weather, the search effort is about to received a big boost.

Dynamic Aviation has chartered a special aircraft to join in the search that is equipped with a Light Detection and Ranging mapping system. LiDAR works like RADAR, only using light waves instead of radio waves. They hope that by using the aircraft’s powerful imaging and contour mapping abilities, they will be able to penetrate dense jungle vegetation and locate the three men. The aircraft arrived the week of Thanksgiving Day, and has already started mapping sections of the search area.

In the meantime, Chan-Palmateer said analysts are pouring over a large amount of aerial photographs from earlier searches to make sure they haven’t missed anything.