A Sightseeing Plane Over Peru's Nazca Lines Went Down in a Field, Killing All 13 People Aboard

NAZCA, Peru — A small plane carrying tourists on a sightseeing flight over the Nazca Lines crashed into a field outside the city of Nazca on Saturday, killing all 13 people aboard, local authorities said.

The municipal government of Nazca said in a statement on Facebook that the aircraft was operated by the Peruvian company Aerodiana and had departed from the nearby city of Ica. Police Major Jorge Andrade said 11 passengers and two crew members died. Rescuers had recovered four bodies at the time of the initial report, and officials said the severity of the impact left no chance of survivors.

Aerodiana advertises on its website that it has flown scenic routes over the Nazca Lines for 14 years using Cessna Grand Caravan aircraft, a single-engine turboprop widely used for short regional and charter work. The company was not immediately available for comment. Peruvian authorities said the cause of the crash is under investigation.

The Nazca Lines are a sprawling collection of geoglyphs scraped into the desert floor south of Lima hundreds of years ago by Peru's Indigenous inhabitants. The figures — a hummingbird, a monkey, a spider, a condor, along with hundreds of straight lines and geometric shapes — are so large that they can only be read from the air or from purpose-built viewing towers. UNESCO designated the site a World Heritage location in 1994, and the overflight has become the standard way tourists see it.

That business has a troubled safety record. Small aircraft flying low, slow banking turns over the desert so passengers on both sides of the cabin can see the figures is inherently demanding work, and Peru's civil aviation authority has grounded operators and tightened rules after previous accidents. In February 2022, seven people were killed when a tourist plane came down near the lines. Earlier crashes in 2008 and 2010 killed a combined 13 people, most of them foreign visitors.

Peru's transport ministry and the civil aviation authority are expected to lead the investigation, examining maintenance records, the aircraft's flight history and weather conditions in the Ica desert corridor at the time. The region is known for strong afternoon thermals and blowing sand, both of which complicate low-altitude flying.

Nazca is a mainstay of Peru's tourism economy, drawing visitors who combine it with Machu Picchu and the Paracas reserve on a single trip. Local officials did not immediately release the nationalities of the dead, and the foreign ministry had not said whether any of the passengers were not Peruvian.