A sightseeing flight over the Nazca Lines crashed and all 13 people on board died
A Cessna flying tourists over Peru's Nazca Lines came down near Socos on Saturday. All 11 foreign passengers and both crew were killed.
Anyone who has heard of the Nazca Lines pictures the same thing: a tiny plane circling above the desert so you can pick out the monkey, the hummingbird and the astronaut scratched into the ground two thousand years ago. It is the only real way to see them. That is the flight that ended in disaster on Saturday.
The aircraft was a Cessna Caravan C-208 operated by the Peruvian carrier Aerodiana. It left Pisco at around 12:10 local time carrying 13 people — 11 foreign tourists and two crew. About an hour later, close to the town of Socos, the crew radioed an emergency to the Nazca control tower. Then nothing. The plane came down at Pueblo Viejo, roughly six kilometres from the city of Nazca, and caught fire. Nobody survived.
Who was on the Nazca Lines flight?
The passengers were all European: seven Italians, two Germans and two Spaniards, alongside the two Peruvian crew members. Peruvian authorities have not finished formal identification, and the government has opened an investigation into the cause, which is still unknown.
One detail is going to matter a great deal in that inquiry. On Friday, sightseeing flights out of the Nazca airfield had already been temporarily grounded because winds were topping 40 kilometres per hour. On Saturday they were flying again. Whether conditions were safe is precisely the question now on the table.
Why do these flights exist at all?
The Nazca Lines have been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1994 and sprawl across hundreds of square kilometres of dry plateau. The geoglyphs only resolve into shapes from the air, which turned sightseeing flights into an entire local industry — small planes, half an hour aloft, dozens of operators. It also comes with a record: a similar flight killed seven people in the same area back in 2022.
If you are planning a trip, the official background on the archaeological site sits on UNESCO’s Nazca Lines listing. This is not somewhere you cross on foot.
It was a heavy weekend elsewhere too: in Moscow, an explosion at a restaurant on Kudrinskaya Square killed three people in the early hours of Sunday.
Image: Diego Delso / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
