Mystery Shrouds Crash Site : Accident: Helicopter pilot dies in steep canyon, 8 miles off course. An unidentified man who said he was a friend vanishes after leading authorities to the location.

The search for a missing Newport Beach helicopter pilot ended Wednesday when rescue workers retrieved his body from a steep canyon east of Orange, where his craft had slammed into a ridgeline in Tuesday night’s heavy fog.

Hanspeter Karl Guggisberg, was flying a Bell 206 helicopter, a charter craft operated by HeliStream Inc. of Costa Mesa, and was en route from San Diego to John Wayne Airport when he crashed, officials said. The wreckage was found in a remote area about one mile southeast of Lake Irvine and about eight miles north of the airport.

The pilot made his last contact with air traffic controllers about 10:45 p.m. but gave no indication that he needed help, according to a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration. An alert went out about 1:15 a.m. when the craft was overdue. Rescue teams did not discover Guggisberg’s body until eight hours later, as the morning haze burned off to reveal the trail of silvery wreckage a few miles off Santiago Canyon Road.

A broken barbed wire fence and a gash in the crest of the ridge, along with another impact mark about 100 yards down into the steep ravine, led authorities at the scene to speculate that the helicopter might have somersaulted after ramming at high speed into the 1,200-foot-high ridge.

“He was coming in too fast in the dark and the fog,” said Bill Collier, the helicopter pilot for the Orange County Fire Authority, who ferried the pilot’s body out of the canyon. “There’s a landing skid that broke off [the helicopter] at the top of the ridge. They don’t come off easy. He must have hit pretty hard for that to happen.”

Investigators from the National Transportation and Safety Board on Wednesday began a probe into the cause of the crash. A spokeswoman for the Orange County Fire Authority said the pilot was an employee of HeliStream, but HeliStream officials did not return phone calls on Wednesday.

The dense fog cover early Wednesday morning hampered the airborne search for the 31-foot helicopter, an effort that was further delayed by early eyewitness accounts that placed the downed craft some 15 miles away from its true crash site. The first person to locate the helicopter was a friend and apparent co-worker of the pilot who was searching the area on foot, a firefighter said.

“He waved us down as we came up,” said city of Orange firefighter Robert Stefano, who, arriving about 9:20 a.m., was the first emergency worker on the scene. “He was in tears. He said he was the guy’s best buddy. He said he had already been down there, so he told us the best way to get down. He kept saying ‘He was the best pilot I’ve ever known.’ ”

The unidentified man, believed to be the person who phoned in the location of the crash, left the scene before he could provide more information, Stefano said. By some reports, the friend also told rescue team members that the pilot was alive when the friend first arrived and had even called him via a cellular phone. But Orange County Sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Ron Wilkerson said he was skeptical of those accounts.

“I’d be very surprised if anyone could have survived that kind of crash,” Wilkerson said. “It is possible, I suppose, but without verification I would tend to doubt that.”

Orange County Fire Battalion Chief Mike Burnett said he was puzzled by how the unidentified friend could find such a remote crash site on foot, and he hoped for more answers when authorities reach the man. “There’s too many unanswered questions, starting with the initial report,” he said.