MOORE COUNTY N.C. – A community is mourning the loss of a man who died doing what he loved.

• Charles Fitzgerald Junior, 66, died Monday while flying his plane back home from South Carolina.
• Fitzgerald was a retired Army veteran.
• The plane crashed a few hundred yards from his home.

Charles Fitzgerald Junior, 66, was killed when his plane crashed in Vass on his way home from South Carolina on Monday.

Fitzgerald was a retired Army veteran.

Roland Gilliam, owner of Gilliam-McConnell Airfield in Carthage, says he’d known Fitzgerald for 10 years and remembers him being friendly.

"We called him Joe. He flies in to my airport pretty regularly to the restaurant. Sometimes he comes in and gets barbecue to go and sometimes he stays and eats,” Gilliam said. "He'd talk and talk and talk. Sometimes too much. Sometimes I'd have to say 'Joe, I've got to go. I've got to go to work, buddy.'"

Fitzgerald was at an airplane event in Camden, South Carolina over the weekend and was to arrive home Monday. Deputies say a concerned friend called them Monday night when Fitzgerald had not returned home.

Major Andy Conway with the Moore County Sheriff’s Office says his team used a drone and infrared technology to try and locate Fitzgerald and his plane, but could not find anything.

"What the SBI was able to gather with cell phone technology and triangulation of the last point in which the cell phone had been active we were able to start a ground search," Conway said.

Officials with the National Transportation Safety Board searched the woods along Cypress Church Road in Vass. They found the wreckage and Fitzgerald inside a few hundred yards from his home.

He was a long-time pilot, owned his own plane, and had a private runway by his house.

The NTSB and FAA are working to figure out what went wrong. Investigators say a preliminary report will be available in a week or two, but the full investigation will take at least a year.