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The single-engine Cessna 172 (not pictured) crashed in Ontario, Canada, but the pilot appears to have vanished. Picture: Flickr/stuart.mike/File image
LAST week, investigators were called to the site of a small plane wreckage in a remote wooded area outside a mining town in Ontario.
The single-engine Cessna 172 had a broken wing, having crashed through trees as it careened towards the snowy ground. Its cockpit was largely intact.
But it was what investigators couldn’t see that left them baffled: any evidence of a pilot.
Mystery surrounds the abandoned “ghost plane” in Canada after authorities confirmed there was no trace of a pilot or passengers — no bodies, no footprints in the snow around the crash site.
And there was no flight-recording equipment on the aircraft to hint at what happened.
“Certainly, it’s unusual,” Transportation Safety Board of Canada senior investigator Peter Rowntree said, according to Ontario’s Chronical-Journal.
“Normally when you go to a crash site, there is someone there.”
The rented plane took off from Ann Arbor, in southern Michigan, and was due to land further north in Harbor Springs. It crashed in Ontario, near the town of Manitouwadge. Picture: Google MapsSource:Supplied
After news of the mysterious crash emerged, police at the University of Michigan, over the border in the United States, confirmed they were investigating a missing postgraduate student who was last seen on March 15, the day of the crash.
Investigators confirmed the aircraft had been rented by someone from the University of Michigan Flyers club in Ann Arbor, near Detroit, on March 15.
It had taken off from an airport in Ann Arbor around 7pm that day, and was bound for the northern resort town of Harbor Springs before it crashed in Canada, about 644 kilometres north of its destination, about 11.40pm.
University of Michigan police have not released the student’s name, age or hometown, but confirmed the student had been filed as a missing person.
Back in Canada, Ontario Provincial Police said a search for the student around the crash site was unsuccessful.
Peter Rowntree said they believed the Cessna may have been on autopilot and ran out of fuel before it crashed.
But because the 33-year-old aircraft couldn’t launch on autopilot, someone would have had to be in the cockpit at takeoff.
And as for whether the pilot escaped before the crash, that theory presented problems, too: the four-seater plane had no roof hatch, and wasn’t designed to carry parachutes.
“When [the pilot] exited, and how [the pilot] exited, is still a mystery,” Rowntree said.
“The only way in or out is through the two main cabin doors.
“We believe it was on autopilot [during the flight] but we can’t prove it.”
Rowntree said this was the most intriguing cases he’d worked on in his 20 years as an investigator, the Chronicle-Journal reported.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada is continuing to investigate the plane crash and the and University of Michigan police are investigating the student as a missing person.