Kremmling – A California man was in serious condition Wednesday and his 3-year-old son apparently unharmed after they spent the night in the wreckage of their light plane that crashed into a ridge.
Ritesh Kumar Lal, 32, and his son, Neil, apparently were trying to land at Kremmling Airport during a rainstorm about 10:15 p.m. Tuesday when the four-seat, single-engine Cirrus Designs aircraft crashed on private property about 4 miles west of town.
“He missed the approach going over Kremmling and was not real high,” said Grand County Sheriff Rod Johnson, who participated in the search. “Kremm ling 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.”
The two apparently had left Palo Alto, Calif., en route to Jefferson County on Tuesday, stopping in Cedar City, Utah, and then attempting to land in Kremm ling during a late-night downpour.
Alerted by the Denver Flight Center that the plane had disappeared from radar and that its emergency-locator transmitter was sending out a signal, the sheriff’s department, the Civil Air Patrol, and rescue teams from Grand, Summit and Routt counties scrambled to find the plane in the darkness.
Rescuers used antennas tuned to the transmitter, kept in the tail of planes and automatically set off by hard landings, to triangulate the approximate location of the aircraft.
But the signals were bouncing off the nearby hills, lending confusion to the search, Johnson said. “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,” he said.
At dawn, searchers looking in that general area spotted the low-wing plane on an exposed sage-covered ridge. It appeared to have skidded about 200 feet before spinning around, Johnson said, leaving its landing gear scattered, doors snapped off and nose damaged.
The pilot, who was conscious, told rescuers he had been unable to use his radio to call for help.
Both father and son were taken to Kremmling Memorial Hospital and then transferred by helicopter to Denver-area medical centers, according to hospital spokesman Eric Murray.
Lal, of Sunnyvale, Calif., was in serious condition Wednesday afternoon at St. Anthony Central Hospital and couldn’t be reached for comment.
The plane crashed on an open ridge in a portion of the Grand River Ranch that has been subdivided into luxury properties known as the Pine Ridge Ranch.
Ranch manager Matt Rice indicated that because there were no trees around, it probably offered the best chance to survive the crash.
The aircraft appeared largely intact, said Doug Young, who joined the search at dawn in his own plane and quickly spotted the wreckage from the air about the same time that crews on the ground found it.
“As of (Tuesday) night, there was some discussion that he had developed a problem, an engine problem, and he was going to divert” to Kremmling, said Young, the fixed-base operator at the small airport.
Although Lal is a licensed commercial pilot and flight instructor trained to rely on his instruments to make landings, Young questioned his decision to land at the unfamiliar and unmanned Kremmling airport for the first time at night.
Gently sloping hills nearby rise several hundred feet above the airstrip at 7,400 feet, and there are few lights or other nighttime reference points in the rural area.
Israel Niv, who owns the plane, said he rents it to members of the West Valley Flying Club in Palo Alto.
He said he put a new $10,000 engine in the plane two weeks ago and that he flew the plane Monday and found it in good condition.
Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board were on the scene Wednesday morning to begin to determine the cause of the crash.
Staff writers Annette Espinoza and Kirk Mitchell contributed to this report.
Staff writer Steve Lipsher can be reached at 970-513-9495 or slipsher@denverpost.com.
