The private airplane had been missing since late Thursday afternoon and apparently crashed on the side of Pine Log Mountain.

James Gilmore, a Cherokee County resident and commercial pilot, was returning in his twin-engine Cessna 414 to the Cherokee County Airport in Ball Ground, said Lisa Musgrave, a Cherokee County fire and rescue department spokeswoman.

Gilmore had taken off from an airport in Rome with two male passengers for the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, but returned them to Rome later Thursday because the tournament was rained out that day, said Civil Air Patrol Maj. Al Schimmelman.

"He departed from Rome about 4:30 p.m. Thursday; it's a pretty short flight to the Cherokee County Airport, probably 15 minutes," Schimmelman said. "The mountaintop was obscured with fog Thursday evening, but with his being a commercial pilot, he wouldn't be flying into something."

Search teams and the Civil Air Patrol began searching for the Cessna on Friday morning after Gilmore's wife alerted officials that her husband had not called, Musgrave said.

Search teams, which had called off the search Friday evening, resumed at daybreak Saturday and found the wreckage roughly 800 feet from the top of Pine Log Mountain in northern Cherokee County.

CAP searchers drove on a dirt road to the mountaintop, and "had to work our way" on foot about 800 feet down the steep mountainside to the crash site, Schimmelman said. They reached the wreckage sometime after 10 a.m., he said.

'There was no immediate indication of any defect with the plane," said Musgrave.