Crews Find Wreckage Next Morning

It could have been A LOT worse... as a father and his three-year-old son were found alive Wednesday morning after their small plane went down during an attempted landing at McElroy Airfield near Kremmling, CO several hours before.

Officials say the Cirrus SR20 (file photo of type, below) crashed about 10:15 Tuesday night, in a heavy downpour, about five miles west of the airport.

"He missed the approach going over Kremmling and was not real high," Grand County Sheriff Rod Johnson told the Denver Post. "Kremmling sits in this bowl kind of area, with mountains around it. So if you miss the airport, you've got to either get up or make a turn back around, and he didn't do either and ran into a hill."

Johnson said the pilot, an unidentified 36-year-old man, suffered "moderate" injuries in the accident. Amazingly, the child appeared unharmed. The pilot told police he had been unable to use his radio to call for help.

Members of the sheriff's department, Civil Air Patrol and rescue teams from surrounding counties participated in the search, which was triggered by an alert from the Denver ARTCC that the plane had dropped off of radar.

Search attempts were initially complicated by signals from the plane's emergency locator transmitter bouncing off hills in the area.

"The beacons, we used them all night long to draw lines on the map to kind of point in the direction of which each hit was coming from," Johnson said. "What's kind of funny about those is you'd think you'd go out and triangulate those things and follow them, but they don't give you the same direction all the time."

Investigators with the NTSB were on scene Wednesday to determine the cause of the accident.

FMI: www.ntsb.gov