Tourist plane crashes near Peru's Nazca Lines, killing 13 aboard

A sightseeing flight over Peru’s Nazca Lines ended in disaster Saturday afternoon when a small tourist plane crashed outside Nazca, killing all 13 people aboard and reviving scrutiny of safety on one of the country’s best-known tourist routes. Police Major Jorge Andrade said from the crash site that everyone aboard had died.

Local authorities said the victims included 11 passengers and two crew members. The plane went down shortly after 1:00 pm local time after taking off for a tour over the Nazca Lines, according to the time line given by TVPeru and Reuters reporting. Nazca’s municipal government said in a Facebook statement that the aircraft was on a sightseeing flight over the lines when it crashed.

The Nazca Lines are one of Peru’s most famous archaeological attractions, a UNESCO-recognized site of massive pre-Columbian geoglyphs etched into the desert in southern Peru. The area draws steady tourist traffic, and small aircraft routinely carry visitors over the figures for aerial views that are not visible from the ground in the same way.

The crash is likely to sharpen questions about oversight of that tourism business, where safety depends on aircraft maintenance, pilot training, weather decisions and operating standards around a fragile heritage site. A similar crash near the Nazca Lines in February 2022 killed seven people, including five tourists and two flight crew, underscoring the risks of the route and the concentration of sightseeing operations around Nazca.

Officials had not publicly detailed the cause of Saturday’s crash in the information available at the crash site, but the death toll was already severe: 13 people, all aboard the aircraft. The victims were killed in a single accident on a flight marketed around one of South America’s most recognizable landmarks, turning a routine tourist overflight into another fatal episode in an area that has already seen deadly air disasters.