Five people died in a small plane crash in Texas late Thursday night, officials said.
They were: Seren Wilson, Brooke Skypala, Stacy Hedrick, Glen Appling and Hayden Dillard. The Amarillo Pickleball Club identified the plane crash victims on social media on Friday.
The plane they were aboard, a Cessna 421C, crashed near the city of Wimberley, Ruben Becerra, the Hays County judge, said on social media.
The victims were traveling from Amarillo, which is 500 miles northwest of Wimberley, to a pickleball tournament in Austin, which is about 38 miles north of the crash site.
The plane took off from River Falls Airport, which is about 15 miles southeast of downtown Amarillo, around 9 p.m. on Thursday. It was scheduled to land at New Braunfels National Airport around 11:20 p.m., according to FlightAware, a flight tracking database.
Emergency personnel responded to the crash around 11 p.m. local time, Mr. Becerra said.
The National Transportation Safety Board said in a statement on Friday that it had opened an investigation.
Mr. Becerra, the top elected official in Hays County, said in his statement that “preliminary information indicates the aircraft was traveling at a high rate of speed at the time of impact.”
The statement noted that there were no signs of a midair collision, adding that a second aircraft that had been traveling in the area landed safely in New Braunfels, a city near San Antonio.
The second plane left River Falls Airport two minutes before the one that crashed.
It landed in New Braunfels around 11:20 p.m., according to FlightAware. It was also transporting a group of pickleball players, according to Dan Dyer, the president of the pickleball club.
The plane that crashed caught fire and had “pretty severe damage,” but some portions remained intact, Sgt. Billy Ray, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Safety, said during a news conference on Friday.
The N.T.S.B. said a “post-impact fire destroyed the aircraft.”
The pilot and four passengers were pronounced dead at the scene, Sergeant Ray said.