BILLINGS — The pilot whose plane crashed in the Pryor Mountains was released from St. Vincent Healthcare on Thursday.

Andrew Scheffer, 18, left the hospital Thursday morning, St. Vincent spokeswoman Jeanelle Slade said.

Scheffer is expected to return to flight training next week.

Meanwhile, state and federal officials worked on investigating the Tuesday night crash and began planning to remove the plane.

Scheffer, an aviation student at Rocky Mountain College, is a licensed pilot. He was taking a flight as part of working toward his commercial rating when he crashed a Piper Archer single-engine airplane owned by Rocky.

He left Billings shortly after 9 p.m. for Powell, Wyo. Scheffer told a St. Vincent doctor that he crashed around 10 p.m. and crawled into the tail of the plane, where he spent the night. The next morning, he climbed up a ridge to get cell phone reception and called for help.

Debbie Alke, administrator of the Montana Aeronautics Division, said the aircraft was spotted before dark Wednesday.

Someone from her department headed to the site Thursday morning to turn off the emergency locator signal, she said. Alke was not available to comment on the progress of removing the plane or whether anyone had reached the aircraft. A snowstorm went through the area Thursday morning.

Mike Fergus, a spokesman for the FAA’s Northwest Mountain Region in Seattle, said investigators will interview Scheffer and his instructor. They may also look at the plane, he said. Fergus estimated that an FAA report could be released within two weeks.

The National Transportation Safety Board also is investigating the crash.

Traute Parrie, district ranger for the Beartooth Ranger District of the Custer National Forest in Red Lodge, said the forest was notified of coordination efforts to remove the plane.

“Our concern is hazardous material to clean up and making sure there are no long-lasting resource impacts,” Parrie said.

Scheffer’s grandmother, Carolyn Scheffer of Friday Harbor, Wash., said Scheffer is eager to get back to his aviation studies.

“His dad asked him, and he said, ‘I want to fly,’ ” she said. “He has a gift for it and a heart for it.”

She said her grandson hopes to someday “fly the big boys” — passenger jets.

“Monday morning he’ll be back to class,” she said.

Carolyn Scheffer said the teenager’s family had been asked by Rocky Mountain College officials not to talk about the crash pending the outcome of the investigation.

School spokesman Daniel Burkhart said that was not the case.

“We have not told them not to talk one way or another,” he said. “We told them, ‘If you want to hold a press conference, we’ll help.’ ”

He said the school had offered to field calls from news agencies so the family could have some privacy. And he said Scheffer’s family still was considering whether to talk to reporters.

Student flights at Rocky were canceled for a second day Thursday, although regular classes and simulator flights continued, said Dan Hargrove, the director of the program. That was done mostly to give staff members a chance to catch up on things after two busy days that followed the crash.

The crash was the most serious in the program’s 20-year history.

In 1991, two Rocky aviation students were killed along with another man during a flight that apparently was not part of the Rocky program. On Oct. 18, 1991, the two students — Nic Hamwey and Trevor Thomas — and Lee Crawford were in a Cessna 172 that went down in the Yellowstone River west of Columbus. The plane was flying at a low altitude and struck a power line over the river, according to a National Transportation Safety Board report.

Hamwey, the pilot, had rented the plane from Corporate Air for the flight, according to an article in The Billings Gazette.

At the time, Corporate Air was one of two companies contracting with Rocky to do flight training for the college.

But the type of flight that the men were on — flying down the river — was not a type included in the syllabus that a Rocky student would have been doing during training, said Hargrove, who became director of Rocky’s program in 2003.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.