A body believed to be that of a missing pilot has been located in the wreckage of a plane in the New South Wales Snowy Mountains.<\/p>\n
A rescue helicopter located the plane near Khancoban at about 4pm yesterday.<\/p>\n
Just before 3pm today police located the body of a man near the crash site.<\/p>\n
The body is yet to be formally identified but police believe it is that of Bega man David Stephens.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
AFP Search and Rescue joined the effort to find the pilot. (Supplied: ACT Police\u00a0)<\/p>\n
His plane was inspected before taking off from Wangaratta in Victoria on Tuesday afternoon.<\/p>\n
The 74-year-old did not arrive at Moruya and an extensive land and air search began.<\/p>\n
Earlier today Riverina Police District Commander Superintendent Andrew Spliet said the crash was not “survivable”.<\/p>\n
“You wouldn’t recognise [the wreckage] it as an airplane \u2026 a fair bit of speed into the mountain range there, which has completely destroyed that aircraft,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It wouldn’t be a survivable collision.<\/p>\n
“There is quite a bit of wreckage from that impact.”<\/p>\n
Police remain at the crash site and it is expected the body will be removed from the site tonight.<\/p>\n
In a statement, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said investigators were working closely with NSW Police to gather evidence, including images of the site and aircraft components containing data.<\/p>\n
Superintendent Spliet said the weather conditions at the time of the crash were “not ideal”.<\/p>\n
An update on the investigation is expected in two months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A body believed to be that of a missing pilot has been located in the wreckage of a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":655,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1161,43,44,4275,4278,4277,4276,4274,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-2837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-david-stephens","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-nsw-plane-crash","tag-nsw-plane-wreck","tag-nsw-police","tag-pilot-missing-nsw","tag-snowy-mountains-plane-crash","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2837\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}