Trevor Sorken worked all day Saturday combing through the tangled wreckage of a plane crash that killed two brothers in a wheat field northeast of Stettler.

As a former firefighter, he'd seen this kind of carnage before, but this time was different: the victims were his cousins, Dean and Lee Sorken.

"I felt from my life experience that I should help in whatever way I could," Sorken said.

His cousins were skilled pilots, Sorken said. They were headed to Killam for a family wedding, but when their Mooney M20C Turbo flew out of Kelowna International Airport at 9:23 p.m. Friday night, they never reached their destination.

Instead, the four-seater plane disappeared from radar just before 11 p.m., said Sgt. Geoff Buxcey, of the Bashaw RCMP detachment. No emergency beacon was activated.

Exactly what happened is unclear, but according to the flight log on flightaware.com, a free air traffic tracking service, the plane was travelling at around 17,000 feet when it began to fall.

As the plane plunged, it accelerated from 222 kilometres per hour to just under 300 kilometres per hour. This was the last recorded speed.

From the crash scene, investigators know what happened in the flight's final seconds.

"The plane hit the ground at a near vertical attitude at a fairly high speed," said Mike Tomm, an investigator with the Transportation Safety Board.

The plane flew over Ben Hofer's home before it crashed. Hofer, who lives in a trailer almost a mile west of the crash site, said he heard a loud whine unlike anything he's heard before. His wife thought it might be a motorcycle or car spinning its tires on the nearby road, but Hofer was sure it came from overhead.

"I thought maybe it just kinda sounded like a plane," he said. "It was just a different noise. Just a sputtering or fluttering noise. I didn't think too much at the time. I was just wondering, 'What in the heck was that?' "

He said his other neighbours on acreages to the north and south all heard the same sound just before 11:00 p.m.

A John Deere backhoe worked at the crash scene Saturday, scooping out mounds of earth and debris until they reached the plane wreckage and bodies buried 10 feet under the ground.

Firefighters and emergency workers piled the fuselage, scorched red leather interior and other debris into a pile 20 metres from the crash.

Dean and Lee were flying to Killam to celebrate another cousin's wedding on the Saturday. Sorken was to join them.

And despite this family tragedy, the wedding went on as planned. Sorken missed the ceremony Saturday afternoon, and by late afternoon, after a long day at the crash site, he wasn't sure he'd be up to the nighttime celebrations.

"I can only guesstimate that there would be a sombre feel," he said.

The Transportation Safety Board is conducting an investigation to find out why the plane went down.

The temperature near Stettler at the time of the crash was 5 C, with winds up to 21 kilometres per hour. Sorken said he thinks the weather may have played a role in the crash, but he's waiting on the TSB's final report to see.

According to Sorken, Dean, 44, was the founder of Real West, an equestrian apparel and clothing company. Lee, 38, worked in heavy construction.

"They were in their prime," he said.

Sorken grew up with the brothers, spending their childhoods building things together and riding around on motorbikes. He said they were "happy-go-lucky, good-natured people."

"It's hard to lose them," he said. "They'll be missed by a lot of people."