Pilot killed in Somkies plane crash
      Spokesman: Fatal crash was first in two years in Smokies
             By Marti Davis, News-Sentinel staff writer
     The body of a 35-year-old Wisconsin man was recovered Tuesday
 afternoon from the wreckage of a single-engine Cessna aircraft he
 was piloting in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
     Jeffrey Mann of New Berlin, Wis., was the only occupant of the
 plane, which crashed just a few hundred yards from the Appalachian
 Trail near Russell Field in the Cades Cove area.
     Authorities did not know if the plane went down Sunday or
 Monday.
     Mann' body was recovered by a team of park rangers, aided by
 helicopters and staff from the Knox and Blount County sheriff's
 departments and the Civil Air Patrol.
     Mann's intended destination was still unknown. His airplane
 missed clearing the ridge top by only about 100 feet, said Cades
 Cove Chief Ranger Jack Piepenbring. The ridge is the state line
 between Tennessee and North Carolina.
     Park officials were notified of the wreck after the Civil Air
 Patrol got word that an electronic beacon was sounding in the area.
     "The beacon automatically begins sending a signal when there's
 a significant impact," explained Bob Miller, park spokesman.
 Satellites receive the signal and report its approximate location.
     Civil Air Patrol Commander Rick Grindstaff of East Knox County
 got a report on the beacon from his counterpart in Memphis about 7
 p.m. Monday evening. He assembled a flight and ground crew, which
 headed for Cades Cove.
     "We flew the coordinates until about 3:30 a.m. this morning,"
 Grindstaff said Tuesday. "We had it pretty well pinpointed by then."
     By 8 a.m. Tuesday, the Knox County Sheriff's Department was in
 the air over the site, using an infrared heat detector. No heat was
 coming from the wreck site, indicating the pilot was probably dead.
     While Knox County sheriff's deputies were circling the site and
 reporting the plane's registration numbers, park ranger Al Voner was
 hiking toward the crash site with two volunteers from Civil Air
 Patrol.
     The trio made the six-mile hike in less than three hours, reach-
 ing the wreck about 10:45 a.m. Voner reported the aircraft's regis-
 tration number and the pilot's license number to park officials by
 radio.
     In the meantime, more than a dozen park rangers had converged in
 Cades Cove, offering to help. A crew of 10 rangers assembled to hike
 to the crash site and helped carry Mann's body to Russell Field.
     Knox County provided two heli|copters to deliver equipment to
 the rescuers, an addition that greatly speeded up the recovery ef-
 forts, Miller. said
     The investigation into the cause of the crash will continue
 today.
     Two park rangers camped near the wreck site to protect the
 evidence.
     By noon Tuesday, a representative of the Federal Aviation
 Administration had arrived in Cades Cove.
     Two investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board
 were expected to hike to the crash site today.
     The airplane crash is the first fatal crash in the Smokies since
 1995, Miller said.
     Knoxville ophthalmologist Ed Malone died when his plane crashed
 near Laurel Falls.
 Knoxville News Sentinel 3 Dec 97
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