Crews had to hike the last half-mile on foot to reach the wreckage. The small medical plane lay in steep, rocky ground in the Capitan Mountains outside Ruidoso, New Mexico, and searchers found it between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Thursday, May 14, Lincoln County Manager Jason Burns said.
All four people aboard were dead. Officials described them as flight crew and medical personnel, and their names have not been released.
The crash happened before dawn and started a wildfire in the surrounding forest. By midday the blaze had grown to 35 acres in dry, windy conditions, according to Burns. He said he was significantly concerned about it, and that local agencies were working with the U.S. Forest Service to contain it.
“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
The plane was operated by Trans Aero MedEvac. It had left Roswell Air Center and was heading for Sierra Blanca Regional Airport on a medical transportation mission. The company reported it overdue after communications and radar contact were lost. The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate.
Trans Aero MedEvac has flown in southeastern New Mexico and west Texas since 1966.
A mountain town, and a bad memory
Ruidoso is a mountain town of fewer than 8,000 year-round residents at the base of the Sierra Blanca range. The area, including Lincoln National Forest, is heavily forested and rural.
The crash recalls a 2007 accident in which five people died when a medical plane went down in the Devil’s Canyon area of Lincoln National Forest, shortly after leaving Ruidoso Regional Airport for Albuquerque.
How common are these crashes?
NTSB records show 25 fatal medical plane crashes in the past 25 years, with nearly 70 deaths. Recent cases include a jet crash in a Philadelphia neighborhood in January 2025 that killed eight people, and an August crash on the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona that killed four. In December, a Mexican Navy plane carrying a young patient and seven others went down in the Gulf off the Texas coast.
Jeff Guzzetti, a former NTSB and FAA crash investigator, said medical evacuation airplane flights are generally no more dangerous than other flights, since they run between airports like any commercial aircraft. Helicopters are a different matter, he said, because they often land on roads or improvised sites to move injured people quickly. A study of the 20 years ending in 2020 found that over 70% of air medical 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.”
