Searchers had to hike the last half-mile over steep, rocky ground to reach the wreckage. A small medical plane went down before dawn Thursday in the mountains outside Ruidoso, New Mexico. All four people aboard died, and the crash set a forest on fire.
Lincoln County Manager Jason Burns said the aircraft was found between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. in the Capitan Mountains, in terrain that is hard to get into. The victims were flight crew and medical personnel. Their names had not been released. The cause of the crash was not known.
“Our hearts and prayers go out to the families, loved ones, friends and colleagues of those who lost their lives in this tragic incident,” Burns said at a news conference.
Wildfire in dry, windy weather
The wreck ignited a blaze that had spread to 35 acres (14 hectares) by midday. Dry, windy conditions were feeding it. Burns said county officials were “very concerned,” and local agencies were working with the U.S. Forest Service to contain the fire.
The flight
The Federal Aviation Administration said the plane left Roswell Air Center for Sierra Blanca Regional Airport. The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate.
The aircraft belonged to Trans Aero MedEvac, which has flown in southeastern New Mexico and west Texas since 1966. The company said the plane was on a medical transportation mission and was reported overdue once communications and radar contact were lost.
Ruidoso is a mountain town of fewer than 8,000 year-round residents, set at the foot of the Sierra Blanca range. Heavily forested, rural country surrounds it, Lincoln National Forest included. A medical plane crashed in the forest’s Devil’s Canyon area in 2007, killing five people, shortly after leaving Ruidoso Regional Airport for Albuquerque.
A pattern of crashes
NTSB records show 25 fatal medical plane crashes over the previous 25 years, which killed nearly 70 people. Several happened in the last 18 months. A jet fell into a Philadelphia neighborhood in January 2025 and eight people died. Four more were killed in August when a plane crashed on the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona. In December, a Mexican Navy plane carrying a young patient and seven others went down off the Texas coast in the Gulf.
Aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti, a former NTSB and FAA crash investigator, said medical planes are generally no more dangerous than other flights, since they travel between airports like any other aircraft. Helicopters are another matter, because they often land on roads or other improvised sites. A study of air medical accidents over the 20 years to 2020 found that more than 70% of fatalities occurred on helicopters.
“Typically when an air medical air plane accident occurs, the reasons are usually the same as any other airplane accident,” Guzzetti said. “There’s not unique issues with the air medical mission.”
