(Trends Wide) — A man and his daughter were missing for hours after their single-engine plane crashed in Pennsylvania, but investigators say they were able to locate them thanks to a signal from the teenager’s iPad.
On Sunday, a plane leaving Wilkes-Barre Scranton International Airport in Pittston Township, Pennsylvania, disappeared from radar shortly after its departure, according to the Pennsylvania State Police.
The pilot, a 58-year-old man, and a 13-year-old girl, were the only passengers in the two-seat, single-engine Cessna 150, police said.
A five-hour general search followed, a joint effort with the United States Air Force Rescue Coordination Center, according to police. The plane and its passengers were found in a heavily forested area about seven miles southeast of Wilkes-Barre Scranton International Airport.
“From what I hear and see, you don’t really hear about survivors, especially in the area where they crashed, it’s heavily wooded,” Bear Creek Volunteer Hose Company chief James Serafin told Trends Wide. “They had to go through trees and everything else. It was definitely a miracle.”
After pinging the plane’s last known location, rescue teams and around 30 other people began doing a grid search in the forest, being careful not to spread out too far as it was late afternoon, it was cold. and it was snowing, but his search was not immediately successful.
Once rescue teams identified the pilot, they contacted his wife, who had been waiting for her husband and daughter at their destination, Serafin said, and obtained the man’s cell phone number.
“They (the rescue team) were able to ping the cell phone and found that the daughter had an iPad and with certain iPads, you can send ping signals, and once we got that coordinate, that’s where we put them,” he said. .
Father and daughter were found in a pre-hypothermic state and suffered minor injuries, police said. Due to their injuries, the two are still recovering in the hospital, Serafin said.
“They were snuggling up to each other trying to keep warm,” Serafin said.
There were no fatalities in the crash and its cause is being investigated by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Trends Wide’s Kay Jones contributed to this report.
