With no known witnesses and no survivors, investigators will have to look at the wreckage, weather conditions and other factors as they search for answers in the plane crash that killed two Malone-area men last week in the High Peaks Wilderness.

The crash on Sunday, Nov. 15 killed pilot Dan Wills, a certified flight instructor who was very familiar with flying over the Adirondacks, and passenger Ron Rouselle, a student pilot. The men were en route to Malone after leaving Saratoga County Airport at about 4:20 p.m. The crash is believed to have occurred just after dark at about 5:10 p.m. when Wills' single-engine Piper Cherokee hit the south face of the 4,607-foot Santanoni Peak.

"Where there is a remote location where there are no survivors, it's harder for our folks and the (National Transportation Safety Board) to glean the information that they need," Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Arlene Salac said. "They still are going through the process to do everything they can to determine the cause of the accident, including evaluating the aircraft."

So far, the only people who have been able to get to the crash site have been forest rangers and state police, who helped remove Wills' and Rouselle's bodies on Tuesday, Nov. 17 after the plane was located. The crash site is more than four miles west of Tahawus Road, and the only fast way to get to it is by helicopter, which can take less than an hour from the Adirondack Regional Airport in Lake Clear. Last week, when state police and state Department of Environmental Conservation forest rangers removed the men's bodies from the site, they flew in helicopters and lowered down forest rangers to the crash site.

"Obviously we like to get to the wreckage as soon as possible, but based on the remote location of the accident site, we just have to work with that - we have to deal with it," said NTSB air safety investigator Ralph Hicks. "It's not that uncommon, when you have these in mountainous terrain, for them to take several days to get the wreckage out."

Hicks is the lead investigator in the case, though the FAA will be doing the on-site work. He's never investigated a crash in the Adirondacks but has worked in the Great Smoky Mountains. He said his preliminary report should be released early this week, and he hopes to have the final report done in six months. Hicks said that the investigation will look at things such as the plane's angle of flight, whether it was level, descending or otherwise.

"We look for signatures through the trees possibly indicating angle of impact with the terrain," he said. "Was it straight and level, or was it in a descent or a decline? We look for those kind of things based on damage to trees, cut tree limbs through the swath of the wreckage path."

Once the wreckage is removed, investigators will inspect it for further indications of what happened, including mechanical problems.

"Damage to the airplane is something we look closely at, indications of rotational damage to the propellor, those types of things," Hicks said. "A lot of these things are going to have to be ascertained once we get the wreckage out."

Other clues may come in the form of weather conditions and the history of crashes in the region. Weather has often played a key role in plane crashes in the High Peaks, although there are not believed to have been any severe-weather conditions in the area that night.

Another plane crash occurred at Santanoni Peak 25 years ago.

In July 1984, pilot Veronica Mary Flood and co-pilot Kenneth James Gono were taking a shipment of auto parts from Robbinsville/Trenton Airport in New Jersey to Montreal when their twin-engine Piper Seneca crashed into the southeastern face of Santanoni Peak at 3,500 feet. Both Flood and Gono died as a result of the accident.

The plane crashed when Flood attempted to descend to 3,500 feet from its cruising altitude of 5,500 feet to avoid cloud cover, according to NTSB records. The pilot, who it was later found didn't adequately prepare for the flight, apparently never knew the mountain was there. Investigators told the Enterprise at the time that it appeared the plane was flying level, or descending slightly, when it hit Santanoni Peak.

So far it's too early to tell if Wills and Rouselle knew how close Santanoni Peak was to them. There was no radio contact with air traffic control at the very end of the flight, and it wasn't even known the plane crashed until the next day, but one clue that could help determine what happened is a handheld GPS unit that was found at the crash site. Small planes such as this Piper Cherokee are not required to have flight recorders, and this one didn't have one, but the GPS could help fill in some information gaps.

"If it was recording, if it was actually operating at the time, then it can actually capture the route of flight and speeds and things, altitudes," Hicks said. "But we don't know if it was operating or not."

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Contact Mike Lynch at 891-2600 ext. 28 or mlynch@adirondackdailyenterprise.com.