Tourist plane crash near Nazca Lines kills 13 in Peru
An Aerodiana Cessna went down in a field outside Nazca on Saturday. All 11 passengers and both crew members died, among them seven Italian nationals.
A sightseeing plane carrying tourists from three European Union countries came down on farmland outside the Peruvian town of Nazca on Saturday, killing everyone on board, 13 people in all. Seven of the dead were Italian nationals, two were German and two Spanish, while both crew members were Peruvian. The crash happened at a site that draws roughly 100,000 visitors a year and that, because of the sheer scale of the figures cut into the desert, is in practice viewed only from a small aircraft.
The single-engine Cessna Grand Caravan, operated by the Peruvian company Aerodiana, went down at about 12:55 local time in the Pueblo Viejo sector, four to six kilometres from the town of Nazca and some 12 kilometres from the geoglyphs themselves. Contact with the control tower was lost only minutes after take-off. Fire swept the crash site immediately.
There was no one left to rescue
The flames ruled out any intervention. Police and local services found pieces of the fuselage scattered across the crops, and four bodies were pulled out in the first hours.
Peruvian police Major Jorge Andrade told reporters at the scene:
We have information that 11 passengers and two crew members have died.
He later described how far the recovery effort had got.
Given the scale of the accident there are no survivors. So far we have recovered four bodies.
Accounts differ on where the flight began. Part of the reporting says the aircraft took off from Pisco aerodrome, about 240 kilometres south of Lima, while the municipality of Nazca says it left from Ica. Both are ordinary starting points for desert sightseeing runs, but the difference matters: it decides how long the plane had been airborne before the tower lost it.
Why are the Nazca Lines viewed from the air?
Because they cannot be seen from the ground. The geoglyphs in the Peruvian desert were made between 500 BC and 500 AD, and the hummingbird, monkey and cat figures, along with a run of geometric lines, are cut into the soil on a scale the human eye only takes in from a few hundred metres up. The site is on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Small aircraft are not an optional extra there but the only way a visitor sees what they travelled for, which keeps traffic over the desert dense and packed into short loops of a few dozen minutes each.
Aerodiana says on its own website that it has been flying sightseeing runs over the Nazca Lines for 14 years, using Cessna Grand Caravan aircraft.
The wind that had grounded the flights a day earlier
Sightseeing flights had been suspended shortly before the crash because of desert winds above 40 kilometres per hour, which lifted dust and cut visibility. Two aircraft were diverted to Marcona airport at the time. Flying then resumed, and a day later one of those runs never reached the geoglyphs.
Peru’s Aviation Accident Investigation Commission (CIAA) has begun collecting evidence on the ground. Three lines are open: mechanical failure, human error and weather. None has been confirmed or ruled out, and findings in cases like this take months.
What the crash puts on the table
This is not the first fatal flight over Nazca. Once an accident repeats on the same route, the question stops being what happened to one pilot and turns into the question of how flying over the site is regulated: who issues the permits, in what wind the planes are cleared to take off, and how old the fleet carrying tourists is.
The answer reaches the town itself. Nazca lives off visitors who come for those few dozen minutes in the air, so any restriction on flights shuts the attraction while the site stays open. Peruvian authorities have not released the names of the dead, and identification and repatriation in cases like this run through the embassies in Lima, here the Italian, German and Spanish ones.
