A small medical plane crashed in a mountain range outside Ruidoso, New Mexico, before dawn Thursday, killing all four people aboard and sparking a wildfire in the surrounding forest, officials said.

The fire had grown to 35 acres (14 hectares) by midday amid dry, windy conditions, according to Lincoln County Manager Jason Burns. Burns said county officials were “very concerned” about the blaze and local agencies were working with the U.S. Forest Service to contain it.

The cause of the crash was unknown, Burns said. The plane was located between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. Thursday morning in steep, rocky terrain in the Capitan Mountains that was difficult to access, with crews hiking the last half-mile to reach the crash site, he said.

The victims were flight crew and medical personnel, Burns said. Their names have not yet been made public.

“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.

The flight departed from Roswell Air Center and was headed to Sierra Blanca Regional Airport, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement. The FAA and National Transportation Safety Board will investigate the crash.

The plane operated by Trans Aero MedEvac had been on a medical transportation mission and was reported overdue after communications and radar contact were lost, the company said in a statement.

“We ask everyone to continue keeping the families of our crew members, as well as the first responders and personnel actively working this crisis, in your thoughts and prayers," the company said.

Ruidoso, a mountain town with a year-round population of less than 8,000, sits at the base of south-central New Mexico’s Sierra Blanca range. The surrounding area, which includes Lincoln National Forest, is heavily forested and rural.

Five people were killed when a medical plane crashed in the Devil's Canyon area of Lincoln National Forest in 2007. That crash came almost immediately after the flight left Ruidoso Regional Airport bound for Albuquerque.

There have been several prominent medical plane crashes in the past 18 months, including when a jet crashed into a Philadelphia neighborhood in January 2025, killing eight people, and four people 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 crashed off the coast of Texas in the Gulf.

A recent study tallied 87 air medical accidents that killed 239 people over a 20-year period ending in 2020. Most of those involved helicopters and some degree of human error such as disoriented pilots, maintenance problems, impairment, fatigue or misjudging the weather.

Medical evacuation plane flights generally aren’t more dangerous than other flights because they travel between airports just like any other plane, aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti said. Medical helicopter flights are more dangerous because they often involve landing on roads or other improvised landing sites such as near a vehicle crash to get injured people to a hospital quickly.

“Typically when an air medical air plane accident occurs, the reasons are usually the same as any other airplane accident. There’s not unique issues with the air medical mission,” said Guzzetti, a former crash investigator for the NTSB and FAA.

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Associated Press writers Jacques Billeaud in Phoenix, Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska, and Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana, contributed to this report.