A Cirrus SR20 airplane that went missing on Tuesday was found in a mountainous part of Wetzel County in West Virginia on Thursday around 2pm.
Illinois married couple, Bill and Pat Searcy, were flying the plane with their dog from Georgetown, Delaware, to Fleming-Mason Airport in Flemingsburg, Kentucky.
They did not survive.
Bill and Pat Searcy of Illinois. The married couple were were aboard a Cirrus SR20 when it went missing Tuesday
They were flying back home from visiting their son on the east coast, according to WPSD.
It wasn’t a survivable crash according to Harrison County Sheriff Robert Matheny.
Delaware Coastal Airport Manager Jim Hickin said the FAA shows the plane departed that facility in Sussex County, Delaware, at 9.07am Tuesday, according to Theet.com.
Hickin said the plane was expected to arrive in Kentucky at 12.15pm later that day.
But the FAA said the plane went off the radar between 11.30am and 3.30pm Tuesday.
The crash site of the aircraft is being guarded by local authorities as the investigation continues to find the cause of the crash, according to The News Center.
‘The FAA will investigate, and the National Transportation Safety Board will determine the cause of the accident,’ FAA spokeswoman Arlene Salac told Theet.com.
The Cirrus SR20 aircraft was equipped with a parachute. Authorities said the plane could have drifted up to 100 miles.
Pat and Bill Searcy. The Illinois couple left Delaware around 9am Tuesday and their plane went off radar between 11.30am and 3.30pm
Fellow aviators at southern Illinois airport described Bill Searcy as an ‘aviation nut’ who was a great pilot that loved to fly and joke around at the airport.
Searcy had more than a thousand hours of flight time along with an excellent rating.
They said the single prop 4-seater plane he was flying Tuesday was a fairly recent purchase, loaded with GPS technology and safety equipment, according to Wsiltv
A Cirrus SR20 pictured above. The plane was a recent purchase for Bill but he more than a thousand hours of flight time
The Cirrus SR20 airplane Searcy recently bought was new to Bill, according to Zac Fager, someone who worked on Bill’s plane for seven years, but Zac doesn’t believe it had anything to do with him and his wife disappearing Tuesday.
‘There’s never a prediction, there’s so many different factors and so many things that could go wrong at any given time,’ Zac told Wsiltv.
‘I mean, you can only hope that whatever you get into you can recover from.’
Zac told Wsiltv that Bill called him last week before he left asking about getting an oil change on his plane when he returned.
Bill was described as an ‘aviation nut’ who was a great pilot that loved to fly and joke around