posted online <\/a>by the Austin American-Statesman showed the aircraft completely destroyed in a wooded area.<\/p>\nRay declined to answer most questions from reporters, noting that federal authorities would lead the investigation.<\/p>\n
Stacey Rohr, who lives nearby, said she was in bed when she heard a crash and “felt everything vibrate.”<\/p>\n
“It was so close I felt like it was the back of my place up in flames,” said Rohr, who immediately called her landlord.<\/p>\n
Cecil Keith said he heard what sounded like an engine backfiring – “pow, pow, pow” – when the plane flew over his house moments before the crash.<\/p>\n
“Something was definitely wrong,” he told KEYE-TV.<\/p>\n
A second aircraft traveling in the area landed safely at the airport in New Braunfels, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) northeast of San Antonio, Hays County Judge Ruben Becerra said. A pilot said he and the Cessna pilot were flying there together, according to Air Traffic Control audio.<\/p>\n
“I haven’t heard anything from him,” the pilot says on the recording.<\/p>\n
A controller responds: “He started to move erratically and now his track is disappeared from the scope. So we want to make sure everything’s all right with him.”<\/p>\n
At least one pilot in the area confirmed the troubled plane’s locator emergency device had emitted a distress signal. The controller called 911.<\/p>\n
It was mostly cloudy in the New Braunfels area shortly before the crash, and there was a thunderstorm two hours later, the National Weather Service said.<\/p>\n
Wimberley, with a population of about 3,000, and New Braunfels, with a population of about 116,000, are tourist destinations in the Texas Hill Country.<\/p>\n
Copyright \u00a9 2026 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WIMBERLEY, Texas — A small plane carrying pickleball players crashed among trees in Texas Hill Country, killing all…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":275584,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[101824,132,134,133],"class_list":["post-275583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-101824","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275583","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=275583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}