NEWCOMB — Two Malone-area men were killed when the Piper Cherokee they were flying crashed Sunday in rough terrain about eight miles south of Lake Placid.

Pilot Daniel R. Wills, 48, of North Bangor, a certified-flight instructor and member of the local band Slab City, and his passenger, Ronald E. Rouselle, 66, of Bombay, died on impact, said friends and fellow pilots who had spoken with State Police investigators and U.S. Border Protection and Customs agents.

The men had gone missing Sunday night, but the plane’s emergency-locator transmitter never sent out a signal for authorities to trace.

That will be among the questions investigators with the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board will answer as they conduct a mandatory post-crash probe.

TOUGH TERRAIN

An exhaustive search for the plane was conducted Monday and into the early morning hours Tuesday, with the crash site on Santanoni Mountain finally located by State Police about 8:35 a.m. Tuesday.

The men had left Saratoga at 4:25 p.m. Sunday and were last seen on radar by Albany airport officials at 4:54 p.m., flying at 4,200 feet, heading toward terrain of 4,600 feet near the Tahawus mining area.

“The problem is, with that area, there is a valley on the right and the mountains on the left,” said Jeff Kearney, a pilot and family friend. “It’s not unusual for the airport to lose radio contact over the mountains when they are flying at that altitude anyway.”

He said the mountain elevations change from 5,344 feet to 4,641 feet in that region near North Creek, North River, Wevertown and Bakers Mills.

No one was at the small Malone Dufort Airport on Sunday night to know that Wills had not arrived. He was the person at the airport who normally would have reported any delay in the expected arrival of a plane.

NEXT DAY

No one knew anything was wrong until Monday, when pilots and people in training were arriving at the Malone airport for their scheduled appointments with Wills, who had logged at least 15,000 hours in the air during his 20 years of flying. Wills did not show up, and his car and Rouselle’s were in the airport parking lot.

“It’s not like Dan to miss appointments,” Kearney said. “Dan was not answering his cell phone, and we couldn’t find him. About 3 o’clock, my wife (Jennifer) called the State Police.”