Authorities have found the body of a student pilot who plummeted to his death during a training flight.
The unidentified victim fell 2,500 feet during his Friday flight. The two-seater plane in which he trained took a devastating final nose-dive after leaving Collegedale Municipal Airport, located just outside Chattanooga, Tennessee, sometime between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., when the pilot in training lost control of the aircraft.
He was not wearing a seat belt, and was thrown from the vessel.
"The people inside the plane were not wearing seat belts," Bradley County interim fire chief Troy Spence reportedly told WRCB-TV Saturday. "When they lost control of the plane, in an attempt to regain control...the passenger was ejected."
According to Spence, there was a dire malfunction in the Zodiac 601 plane, a light aircraft primarily used for sport, made all of medal and built from a pre-cut-pre drilled kit, which led to "a rapid descent."
The canopy of the small plane flew off in the middle of the flight, reports USA Today.
The pilot's training instructor, also anonymous, landed the plane at a nearby airport and informed authorities, all of whom immediately began pouring through the countryside, looking around East Brainerd, Tennessee for the victim.
Using GPS coordinates from the cell phone said victim had on him at the time, authorities were able to locate the body Saturday morning.
Bob Gault, spokesman for the Bradley County Sheriff's Office, gave Retuers the chilling news: "They found him in a tree line, not too far off the road," he said.
Local reports claim the man who passed was a tenured flier, and was in the midst of being trained to fly that particular plane, as he had just purchased it.
An airport worker who asked to remain anonymous told Reuters the two men were experienced pilots and "real nice guys."
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
