on social media<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Emergency personnel responded to the crash around 11 p.m. local time, Mr. Becerra said.<\/p>\n
The National Transportation Safety Board said in a statement on Friday that it had opened an investigation.<\/p>\n
Mr. Becerra, the top elected official in Hays County, said in his statement that \u201cpreliminary information indicates the aircraft was traveling at a high rate of speed at the time of impact.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The second plane left River Falls Airport two minutes before the one that crashed.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The plane that crashed caught fire and had \u201cpretty severe damage,\u201d but some portions remained intact, Sgt. Billy Ray, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Safety, said during a news conference on Friday.<\/p>\n
The N.T.S.B. said a \u201cpost-impact fire destroyed the aircraft.\u201d<\/p>\n
The pilot and four passengers were pronounced dead at the scene, Sergeant Ray said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Five people died in a small plane crash in Texas late Thursday night, officials said. They were: Seren…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":275441,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[98959,132,134,133,504,505,27,101975],"class_list":["post-275440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-airlines-and-airplanes","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news","tag-federal-aviation-administration","tag-national-transportation-safety-board","tag-texas","tag-wimberley-tex"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}