A small plane crashed into nearly inaccessible woods south of Orangeburg late Friday night.

The pilot, whose name was not immediately released, was taken to The Regional Medical Center in Orangeburg for assessment.

She told authorities she was flying from Savannah, Ga., to Columbia.

The pilot was trapped until rescue workers could find the wreckage and free her.

“The Federal Aviation Administration will complete the investigation, but it appears she ran out of gas,” said John Smith, Orangeburg County’s director of emergency services.

After the crash, the woman used her cellphone to call authorities. But she did not know where she was, except that she was near some industries and a railroad track.

Dozens of fire, rescue and public safety personnel converged on the Orangeburg Municipal Airport to launch a massive search on foot, in vehicles and in the air.

An airplane took off from the airport to search from overhead, and the State Law Enforcement Division sent a helicopter.

She was finally located near the city’s wastewater treatment plant, behind the Gulbrandsen manufacturing facility off Rowesville Road.

It was the second of three aviation-related incidents of the evening.

Hours earlier, Orangeburg County authorities were notified that a satellite had picked up a distress signal from an electronic locating transmitter, or ELT, in the vicinity of the Orangeburg-Berkeley county line east of Holly Hill.

Smith said many things can touch off an ELT transmitter: a hard landing, bad batteries, an accidental bump by a pilot — and sometimes nothing discernible at all.

Sometimes a pilot will accidentally set one off, but neglect to notify authorities that there was no emergency, Smith said.

As a precaution, police and fire personnel checked the parked airplanes at the Holly Hill Airport and combed the woods near the county line, but two subsequent passes by the satellite did not detect any signals from an ELT.

As they closed the search, authorities received the 911 call from the woman who had crashed in her plane.

A Civil Air Patrol plane that already was in the air in response to the ELT signal was immediately redirected to Orangeburg.

“We were talking to her on the phone, and she didn’t know where she was,” Smith said.

She couldn’t reach her global positioning system device and “she was trying to describe things” she could see from her plane, Smith said.

The CAP plane picked up her transmission, and ground crews located the downed plane.

As the woman’s rescue was under way, county officials received word of yet another ELT transmission, this one reported emanating from an area along Willow Swamp Road near Norway.

Smith said authorities responded to make sure it was not a “shadow” signal from the woman’s downed plane. They had not located the source of the signal by press time.

“I cannot believe the kind of night it is,” Smith said.

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