A Cessna Grand Caravan crashed Saturday in Pueblo Viejo, about four miles from Nazca, killing all 13 people aboard. Eleven were tourists. Two were crew. [1]
The aircraft had left Pisco around 1 p.m. local time for an overflight of the Nazca Lines. Police said it lost contact and went down at 1:20 p.m. The passengers were seven Italians, two Germans, and two Spaniards. The pilot and copilot were named as Americo Salazar Cuellar and Irenka Del Carpio. [1]
The paper’s Sunday piece on a Peruvian Air Force Boeing 737 treated a military transport as the crash of the weekend. The verified Monday record is a different machine, a different passenger list, and a different economy: the sightseeing circuit that makes the geoglyphs pay.
Police Major Jorge Andrade told reporters there were no survivors. Video showed firefighters working the smouldering wreckage in the desert. [1] Reuters and BBC matched the 13-dead tourist count. [2][3] Several operators compete for overflights of the Unesco site. Safety complaints are not new. A 2022 crash killed seven. In 2010 four British tourists and two Peruvian crew died on an AirNasca flight. Earlier that year a Cessna 206 killed seven more. In 2008 five French tourists died. [1]
Peru’s tourism ministry expressed “deep sorrow.” The municipality of Nazca said investigation and oversight belong to the competent authorities. [1] AeroTime identified the operator as Aerodiana and said officials later suspended the carrier. [4]
X spent the weekend arguing Boeing maintenance and military procurement. The wreck on the sand is a Grand Caravan full of Europeans who paid to see a hummingbird scraped into dirt. The lines are visible only from the air. That is the business model, and the hazard.
Cause remains unknown. That is the only honest sentence left for investigators. The rest is a ledger of prior crashes that never closed the route.
Nazca’s municipality and the tourism ministry issued the statements governments issue when the product is a view and the cost is a fuselage. The etchings — hummingbird, monkey, whale — date to roughly AD 200–700. Hundreds of thousands come each year because the figures cannot be read from the highway. [1] That is not a metaphor. It is why a Grand Caravan was in the air at 1 p.m.
The Aug. 2 military-737 account that circulated in some desks does not match Saturday’s passenger list, operator, or airframe. Readers should not merge the two wrecks. One is a tourist circuit with a published death history. The other, if it happened as first filed, is a different investigation. Today’s confirmed dead are the 11 Europeans and two Peruvians named above. [1][2][3] AeroTime’s grounding note, if it holds, is the first operational consequence that is not a eulogy. [4] Overflight tourism will resume. It always has. The question is which certificate flies next. Families in Milan, Madrid, and Berlin will want a cause before they want a brochure. They should.
-- LUCIA VEGA, São Paulo