The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Plane parachute saves the day…and the pilot
It was one of the more unusual search and rescue operations conducted in Crested Butte Search and Rescue (CBSAR) history. It started with a plane icing up and eventually settling at the top of Reno Divide thanks to a parachute. It ended with dinner at the Last Steep.
According to CBSAR president Nicholas Kempin, the Gunnison Sheriff’s dispatch received a report of a plane in trouble and possibly crashing up Cement Creek on Friday afternoon. The plane’s emergency locator had been activated and transmitted the emergency signal to the Air Force in Florida. An officer there alerted the Gunnison County Sheriff’s Office, which in turn paged CBSAR, which got the alert about 3:30 p.m. Friday.
“The pilot was very experienced and he had taken off from Centennial Airport heading to Utah. He was alone,” explained Kempin. “Apparently when he got over the area, the weather was pretty nasty. The plane started icing up and he was unable to maintain altitude.”
The Gunnison County Sheriff’s Office reported that 41-year-old William Zitting of Utah said his plane became disabled due to ice conditions. As it began to descend he cut power and deployed a parachute that was designed into the craft.
“He was in a Cirrus SR-22 which is a pretty cool plane,” Kempin explained. It has a unique safety feature known as the Cirrus Aircraft Parachute System (CAPS), an emergency parachute capable of lowering the entire aircraft and occupants to the ground in an emergency. The parachute can be deployed by pulling a red T-bar handle located overhead in the cockpit.
“Given his situation of not being able to maintain altitude or control the plane, the pilot went through the procedure to deploy the parachute on the plane. It worked and he came to rest at the top of Reno Divide,” said Kempin.
Kempin said the plane is sitting very close to where a mountain biker would start the descent of Reno-Flag-Bear on the flank of Italian Mountain.
“For us, we heard about a plane crash and it was in bad weather conditions so we were thinking the worst,” said Kempin. “But then we heard about the parachute it changed everything. I’d read about those planes and knew there was a very good chance that it was a survival situation. In fact, when we got up there, [Zitting] was on the ground and uninjured.”
The CBSAR team took snowmobiles to the scene. They had to be aware of avalanche potential in the area and the snowmobiling in the fresh snow wasn’t easy. “There was some technical, demanding snowmobiling to get up there,” admitted Kempin. They got to the top of Reno about 9 p.m. and found Zitting cold but uninjured.
“He was lucky,” said Kempin. “When the parachute is deployed the pilot doesn’t have control of the plane. It is up to the wind. It could have landed in a bunch of trees or on a steep slope and started to tumble or started an avalanche. But it looked like a pretty soft landing in the flats.”
Kempin said a Careflight helicopter had attempted to search the area earlier in the day after the alert but weather conditions prohibited the chopper from getting close to the upper Cement Creek valley. The Careflight crew tried again and located the crash site about the same time the ground crew arrived on the scene. “It was pretty high up there, so such a high landing zone would have made a helicopter rescue complicated,” said Kempin.
As it was, the six-person field team put the pilot on the back of a snowmobile and headed to Crested Butte. They were out of the area by about 10:15 p.m. The pilot chose to not go to the hospital or have any medical evaluation.
“He did say he was pretty hungry,” said Kempin. The team met up with the other four members of the SAR team who were in town and, given the late hour, they all ended up at the Last Steep for some dinner, where Zitting offered to pick up the tab.
“Crested Butte Search and Rescue were fabulous on this one,” commented Sheriff Rick Bessecker. ”It was an extremely courageous response to a dire circumstance.”
How or when the plane will be removed from the site is anyone’s guess at the moment.
