DENVER—An Iowa man who was piloting a small plane over the Colorado mountains apparently didn’t make a distress call before the plane crashed, killing him and a passenger.
The last transmission that air traffic controllers received from the plane before the crash was the pilot confirming instructions to descend to 17,000 feet, according to audio recordings released this week by the National Transportation Safety Board.
The pilot, Michael O. Welton, and his only passenger, Roswitha Marold, were killed on Jan. 9 when his single-engine Piper Malibu crashed in the southern Colorado mountains.
Welton’s voice on the recording was calm and there was no hint of trouble in any of his conversations with controllers, according to audio recordings through a Freedom of Information Act request obtained by The Associated Press.
About 8 minutes after Welton’s last transmission, a ground controller in Denver tried unsuccessfully to contact him. The controller then asked a pilot in another plane in the area to try, but he also got no response.
The controller asked the other pilot and an air traffic controller in Pueblo to listen for an emergency locator signal from the plane, but neither heard one.
Welton, 66, a doctor, and Marold, 70, a retired business owner, were both from Waterloo, Iowa. They were en route from the Phoenix area to Pueblo, Colo.
The wreckage was found a day after the crash, about 110 miles southwest of Denver and 60 miles west of Pueblo. It was in deep snow and heavy timber at about 9,700 feet elevation in the Sangre de Cristo range.
The NTSB hasn’t released the cause of the crash. The investigator in charge of the case didn’t immediately return calls.
