A small tourist plane carrying 11 passengers and two pilots crashed over the Nazca Lines archaeological site in southern Peru on Saturday, killing everyone on board, according to Peruvian officials and local news reports (BBC News).

The plane took off from an airport in Pisco, Peru, and crashed around 1:00 p.m. local time in the Pueblo Viejo region. Police Major Jorge Andrade confirmed there were no survivors and reported that four bodies had been found so far, according to AFP. The cause of the crash and the identities of the passengers were not yet known as of the latest reporting.

The Nazca Lines are a UNESCO World Heritage site — giant ancient drawings etched into the desert floor of southern Peru over a thousand years ago. Some of these designs stretch hundreds of feet across. Because they are so large, they are best seen from the air, and small planes regularly fly tourists over them.

Saturday's crash is the third deadly tourist-plane accident at the site in just over a decade. On February 4, 2022, a similar plane on a Nazca Lines tour crashed, killing seven people: five tourists and two crew members. The victims included three Dutch tourists, two Chilean tourists, and two Peruvian pilots (Reuters; The Guardian). In 2010, another tourist plane crashed over the same site, killing six people on board (BBC News).

Recovery efforts at the crash site were ongoing. Authorities had confirmed four bodies recovered as of the latest reporting, with nine still unaccounted for at that stage. No information had been released about the type of aircraft, the company operating it, the weather at the time, or whether the crew sent a distress signal before the crash.

Peruvian aviation authorities and local police will lead the investigation.

The broader picture is that three deadly crashes in sixteen years — all involving small planes flying tourists over the same stretch of desert — suggests a repeating problem rather than a one-time mistake. Small planes flying low over desert land deal with sudden temperature changes that can affect how engines perform, unusual wind patterns in the Nazca desert, and the pressure of running lots of flights for a busy tourism industry. Even without knowing what caused Saturday's crash, this history raises questions about how well Peru regulates sightseeing flights — including how planes are maintained, how pilots are trained and certified, and how often safety inspections happen.

The impact also reaches beyond Peru. The 2022 crash killed people from three different countries. Saturday's passenger list has not been released yet, but tourists on Nazca flights typically come from all over the world, so several foreign governments may become involved. For Peru's tourism industry, which relies on the Nazca Lines as a top attraction, repeated deadly accidents at the same site could damage its reputation well beyond this tragedy. Whatever caused this crash, the larger question of whether these flights are safe enough will follow.