One person is dead after a small plane crashed near Calabogie, Ont., about 120 kilometres west of Ottawa.

The crash happened Monday at about 12:20 p.m. ET between Calabogie and Griffith, Ont., said Ontario Provincial Police spokeswoman Sgt. Kristine Rae.

Goderich Municipal Airport confirmed the six-seat Socata TBM-700 was travelling from the Carp Airport, west of Ottawa, to Goderich, Ont., in southwestern Ontario.

The airport confirmed the pilot died but the plane's owner, Lorenzo Girones, who registered the Socata just two weeks ago, was not aboard.

He is a lawyer from Timmins, Ont., who runs his own practice and who had just bought the plane brand new, according to Transport Canada records.

The plane was scheduled to leave Carp at 12:07 p.m. ET and arrive in Goderich at about 1:30 p.m. ET — the first leg of a round-trip flight — with two people aboard.

Police confirmed one person had been killed.

ORNGE air ambulance service was asked to send a helicopter from Toronto, but that request was cancelled at about 2:30 p.m. while the helicopter was in the air close to Calabogie.

Plane crashed in heavily-wooded area

Police officers and paramedics had to use all-terrain vehicles to reach the crash site, which is in a heavily-wooded area near Black Donald Lake. Paramedics have since been released from the crash site.

Greg Veldhuizen was at his trailer nearby when he said he heard a loud noise and saw the plane go down. That is when he and four others rode their ATVs to the site and found the plane.

"The scene where we came was all pieces of the plane around," he said.

"You saw part of the engine, a little smoking, some other pieces, little fires from a foot high."

Marc Allain was at a cottage nearby on the same lake when he said he and his friends heard a loud engine in the sky.

Witness Greg Veldhuizen said he could not believe the number of pieces when he used an ATV to reach the plane crash site. (CBC)

"Someone in our group pointed to the sky and said, 'Look it's a plane up there doing loop-de-loops,'" he told CBC News.

"Then next thing you know we sort of lost it behind the trees and then [there was] a loud explosion sound and then a big, black plume of smoke in the sky."

According to the online flight tracking service FlightAware.com, the plane was travelling at about 27,000 feet at 12:17 p.m., but the next recorded altitude was 5,200 feet just two minutes later.

The Transportation Safety Board sent two investigators to the crash site to test for safety deficiencies.