UPSIDE down and injured in the mangled wreck of his single-engine Cessna, Scott Kennedy-Green managed to reach for his UHF radio.
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"Crashed aeroplane. Anyone copy?" the renowned Sydney auctioneer pleaded from the side of a steep ravine, as his brother-in-law, Matthew Green, 32, bled to death beside him.
After a day spent mustering cattle in Mudgee, the pair were returning to the family's Glen Innes farm for a Christmas Eve dinner, when thick fog set in and the small aircraft slammed into rugged mountains in Coolah Tops National Park, north of Merriwa in the Upper Hunter.
It was about 4.30pm, but it would take a further 18 hours during which his wife, Angela, and two children, waited anxiously for news before Mr Kennedy-Green was spotted by a search team.
Attempts to rescue him yesterday almost turned to disaster when the Hunter Westpac rescue helicopter clipped some trees near the crash site.
The helicopter was forced to make an emergency landing in a nearby paddock.
A NSW Ambulance helicopter later extricated Mr Kennedy-Green, chief auctioneer at McGrath Estate Agents.
"He is extremely strong physically and mentally and there's no doubt that would have helped him deal with the situation overnight," his boss, John McGrath, said after visiting Mr Kennedy-Green at Westmead Hospital last night.
"He was quite heavily sedated [but] in reasonable physical condition under the circumstances. Obviously [he is] devastated at the loss of his brother- in-law."
Mrs Kennedy-Green said she was too distraught to talk about the accident.
"We are still trying to come to terms with what's happened. I can't get my head around that," she said.
Her uncle, who did not want to be named, said it should have been a routine trip for the two men.
"It's been quite a horrendous day. Angela's lost her brother and her husband is in hospital," he said.
He said it was not a journey the pair made often and it was a new property for Mr Kennedy-Green.
Truck driver Col Doer said he was delivering diesel at a mine site near Mudgee when he received Mr Kennedy-Green's distress call on his UHF radio.
"I heard this come over the radio. 'Crashed aeroplane. Anyone copy?'. I thought it was quite surreal, a shock," he said.
"He was short breathed. I thought at first it was a joke, but then a couple minutes later the same message came over again. So I said 'Copy, the crashed plane, what seems to be the problem?"'
Mr Kennedy-Green told Mr Doer he had crashed about 35 kilometres south-west of Tamworth and that he was flying 380 kilometres from Mudgee to Glenn Innes.
An initial search, based on the coordinates, by police, ambulance paramedics, the Volunteer Rescue Association and helicopters failed to find the crashed plane.
"He started telling me he got into some difficult weather, bad fog, hit this mountain and that his partner was bleeding severely from the head. He said he was bandaging him up and that he himself thought he had a broken leg and dislocated shoulder," Mr Doer said.
He then lost the signal which another truck driver picked up.
A CareFlight spokesman said they were alerted to the wreckage on the side of a steep ravine by a property owner and were able to search the area when cloud lifted shortly before 10am.
"The plane had gone into trees, broken through them and landed upside down with one of its wings ripped off. The right wing was off and the tail was bent up. It was pretty isolated out there," air crewman Steve Hughes said.
In another aircraft accident yesterday, a man died after his light plane clipped a power line and crashed into a paddock in south Gippsland, Victoria.
Last week, a light plane crashed into a house in Casula in Sydney's south-west, killing two people.
