- Melanie Coffee walked through the night over sloping tundra to reach rescuers
- She then guided them back to the site of a small plane crash where four people were dead
- The dead included her infant son, who she tried to give CPR, according to newspaper report
- Five other people were injured
(CNN) -- The small plane had crashed in an extremely remote part of Alaska, miles from the tiny village of St. Mary's.
It was an especially dark and foggy Friday night, and rescuers were having a hard time figuring out the location of the Cessna wreckage and its 10 passengers.
They could hear survivor Melanie Coffee on the phone but with the poor weather, it was a frustrating needle-in-a-haystack kind of task.
But Coffee, 25, made her way a half-mile across the slippery, sloping tundra and managed to find the town's landfill, where she met the search party of 40 to 50 villagers and calmly guided them on foot back to the crash site.
Dietmar Eckell's bid to photograph what he calls "miracles in aviation history" -- airplanes that were forced down without loss of life -- has taken him from African deserts to Papua New Guinean swamps, like this photo. "In Papua New Guinea, hiking to the plane was like a time travel -- you pass villages where nothing has changed in the 70 years since the plane landed," says Eckell. "No electricity, running water, and they still go fishing in the dug-out canoes." The B-24D Liberator, an American heavy bomber, has rested in this swamp since 1943, during World War II. 
A Cessna 310Q in repose in western Australia. Eckell wants to self-publish a coffee table book about the airplanes and has a fund-raising page. He calls his online gallery "Happy End." "Our perception 'automatically' thinks of a disaster until we learn that all survived and were rescued from the remote location," Eckell tells CNN. The photographer, who operates out of Dusseldorf, Germany, and Bangkok, Thailand, shot these photos from August 2010 to March 2013. 
A Vought F4U Corsair ended up in Hawaiian waters a few years after World War II ended. The bent-wing Corsair was a fighter-bomber that saw service on aircraft carriers. Even in their death, Eckell finds the airplanes to be beautiful, still majestic while lost in nature's vastness. 
The fuselage of a Douglas C-47 is covered in dust in a vast Icelandic landscape. Taking such photographs sometimes requires inconvenience. "You have to be willing to spend long hours traveling with very little comfort," says Eckell. "Like hike with all your gear for a few days and wait for days if no local transport is available." The German photographer has encountered polar bears and snakes while making his way to remote areas to find abandoned remains. 
A twin-engine Fairchild C-82 Packet, which carried cargo, was lost in Alaska in 1965. 
The photographer uses the Internet, forums, archives and Google Earth to find the aircraft. "Once in the area, I ask local pilots for information on the story and location," says Eckell. Here a Grumman HU-16 Albatross wing rests in the surf on Mexico's Pacific Coast. It wrecked in 2004. 
This Douglass C-46, was lost in 1977 in Manitoba. On one of his websites, Eckell says pilots who got crew members through harrowing situations are heroes. 
A Douglas C-47 rests on a rocky field in Canada's Yukon territory. The aircraft went down in 1950. Most of the airplanes he photographed made forced landings because of engine failure, Eckell says. In some cases, there were injuries. 
A Cessna T-50 "Bamboo Bomber" has been in Alaska since the 1960s. The five-seat aircraft was used for training and transport. 
An Avro Shackleton, a British-made maritime patrol aircraft, is swallowed by the sand in Western Sahara. A local rebel group helped Eckell reach the site from Mauritania. "We had to go cross-country, as the military would stop us on the gravel roads -- a different kind of thrill." 
Eckell says he is more concerned with a plane's juxtaposition with nature than its actual condition. The wing of a Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar slices the Alaskan wilderness, where it has rested since 1981. 
This Curtiss C-46 Commando, a transport aircraft, went down in Manitoba, Canada, nearly 35 years ago. In a wreckage search, proper orientation is a must, says Eckell. "You should know exactly where you want to go; in thick bush even the smallest mistake can get you lost." 
A Bristol 170 Freighter, lost in 1956, appears to take a drink of water in Canada's Northwest Territories. Eckell's other photographic work of "abandoned objects" includes Cold War relics, overgrown adventure parks and Olympic sites. 
Remains of planes called 'miracles' For four people, including her 5-month-old boy, it was too late. They had died from their injuries.
The others had wounds that included head injuries and multiple fractures.
Had it not been for her going for help, more victims might have died, said Clifford Dalton, a paramedic for LifeMed Alaska.
"The fact that she could make it out to an identifiable landmark really helped to expedite the aid that the rest of the patients were able to receive," Dalton said. "What's really remarkable about it is that she was tending to her infant child that was gravely injured at the time."
The Anchorage Daily News reported that after the crash, Coffee used a cell phone to call the on-call health aide for St. Mary's, population 500. Fred Lamont Jr. told the newspaper Coffee was trying to give her infant son CPR.
Dalton called Coffee a hero who put the needs of others before her own.
Dalton said he and his partner, Paul Garnet, helped treat the patients at the site. Six to eight villagers helped carry each survivor to the landfill, which was as close as the ambulances could get. Concerned residents also came to help from Mountain Village, about 25 miles away, where most of the victims were from.
Authorities are unsure why Hageland Aviation Flight 1453 crashed. It left Bethel at 5:40 p.m. and went down about four miles from the St. Mary's airport.
"Hageland is working to gather information to answer questions and do what we can to ease the suffering of those involved in the accident. As a family-owned business this is an unspeakable tragedy for us," company president Jim Hickerson said on Hageland's Facebook page.
Authorities said the dead were Wyatt Coffee, 5 months; pilot Terry Hanson, 68; Richard Polty, 65; and Rose Polty, 57.
Four of those injured were hospitalized in fair condition, officials said. They are: Pauline Johnson, 37; Shannon Lawrence (age not given); Tanya Lawrence, 35; and Garrette Moses, 30. Also injured was Kylan Johnson, 14, who was treated and released.
A spokeswoman for the the Alaska Native Medical Center said Melanie Coffee was in fair condition and wasn't giving interviews.
The National Transportation Safety Board said Sunday it was too early to determine if weather was the cause.
Alaskans depend on air transportation far more than residents in other states because many villages aren't on the road system.
About 35% of commuter plane and air taxi crashes in the United States between 1990 and 2009 occurred in Alaska, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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CNN's Paul Vercammen, Stan Wilson, Karan Olson and Joe Sutton contributed to this story.
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