The body of a pilot was found Saturday, after dozens of search crews worked late into the night by foot and air, resuming when daylight returned.

The student pilot, who was not wearing a seat belt during a training flight, tumbled from his small two-seater plane when it went to a nose dive over rural Tennessee. The pilot in training recently purchased the single engine plane and was taking lessons from a more experienced pilot when the accident happened. .

Reuters reported that the body of the student pilot was found in a tree-line not far from a roadway.

The unidentified victim fell 2,500 feet to his death during the flight Friday, WRCB-TV reported.

 “The people inside the plane were not wearing seatbelts,” said Bradley County interim fire chief Troy Spence to WRCB-TV. “So when they lost control of the plane, in an attempt to regain control of the plane, the passenger was ejected.”

Spences said the airplane’s instructor had a malfunction with the Zodiac 601 “and had a rapid descent.”

The instructor, who was also not named, managed to land the plane at the airport while emergency crews searched the countryside around East Brainerd, Tennessee, about eight miles away from where the incident occurred. East Brainerd is in the Chattanooga area.

Authorities were able to close in on the likely location of the body using GPS coordinates and the pings from cellphones that the student pilot was carrying at the time.

They searched the area from the last cellphone ping, which was near Weatherly Switch Road in Bradley County. One of the first clues they found was a pre-flight checklist torn in two that was lying in a field. Moments later, they found another clue, confirming that the search and rescue team are getting closer.

"Three hundred yards from here we actually found a hat that indicated it had been on the aircraft. That lead us to believe we were definitely in the right area and we were going to have success today,” Spence told WRCB-TV.

They discovered the body of the student pilot around 11:30 AM Saturday. Spence described, “"He was on the ground. Back across Weatherly Switch right here and Lead Mine Valley, both of those roads is where we found the victim.”

Crews used ATVs to pull the man’s body from the woods that was only about 150 yards off Lead Mine Valley Road.