Tourist Plane Crashes Near Peru's Nazca Lines, All 13 Aboard Killed

A small tourist plane crashed Saturday while flying tourists over Peru's Nazca Lines, killing all 13 people on board, according to Police Major Jorge Andrade, who spoke to reporters at the crash site.

Andrade said 11 passengers and two crew members died. "Given the severity of the accident, there are no survivors," he said, according to the BBC and the South China Morning Post, which cited Agence France-Presse. Police had recovered four bodies at the time Andrade spoke.

The plane went down around 1 p.m. local time in the Pueblo Viejo area, according to the BBC. It had departed from an airport in Pisco, a city roughly 240 kilometers, or 150 miles, south of Lima, according to the South China Morning Post. The Guardian reported the plane departed from the nearby city of Ica; Nazca's municipal government, which The Guardian cited, identified Ica as the departure point rather than Pisco specifically.

The aircraft belonged to Aerodiana, a Peruvian sightseeing company that runs regular flights over the Nazca Lines, according to the BBC, Al Jazeera and The Guardian. The Guardian reported Aerodiana was not immediately available for comment. The BBC said it had contacted the airline as well.

Local media reports said the crash site was quickly engulfed in flames, which prevented any rescue attempts, according to Al Jazeera. Images posted on Facebook by local news outlets showed firefighters and police working amid twisted, smoldering wreckage, the South China Morning Post reported.

Peruvian authorities have opened an investigation into the crash, according to The Guardian. Peru's civil aviation authority will examine what caused the plane to go down, the South China Morning Post reported, noting that Andrade gave no immediate indication of a cause.

The identities of those on board have not been released. Nazca's provincial municipal government issued a statement in Spanish expressing "deep sorrow" over the crash and offering "heartfelt condolences to the families of the deceased," according to the BBC.

A site with a troubled aviation history

The Nazca Lines are a UNESCO World Heritage site featuring massive geoglyphs, depictions of animals like monkeys, hummingbirds and cats, along with geometric shapes, etched into the desert floor between roughly 500 BC and 500 AD. UNESCO describes the site as "among archaeology's greatest enigmas," and the drawings are best viewed from the air because of their enormous scale, spanning kilometers across the desert near Peru's southern coast.

That has made small sightseeing planes a fixture of the local tourism economy, and a recurring source of tragedy. Saturday's crash is not the first fatal accident over the site. A tourist plane crashed there in 2022, killing seven people, and another went down in 2010, killing six, according to the BBC.

Peru drew more than 4.1 million tourists in 2025, according to the country's Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism, cited by Al Jazeera. Machu Picchu and the ruins around Cusco remain the country's biggest draws, but the Nazca Lines are among its most recognizable sites, precisely because they can only be fully understood from a plane window.

What's still unknown

No cause has been announced. Peru's civil aviation authority has not released findings, and it is not yet clear whether mechanical failure, pilot error, weather, or some combination played a role. Aerodiana has not issued a public statement in the sources reviewed here, and the identities of the 11 passengers and two pilots have not been confirmed.

The pattern of fatal crashes at this same site in 2010 and 2022 will likely draw scrutiny to whether Peruvian regulators and sightseeing operators have made meaningful safety changes over the past 16 years, or whether small aircraft flying tight, repetitive routes over the desert remain an underregulated risk for the millions of tourists who visit the region each year.