A small plane with four people on board crashed in a field beside a roadway in rural Illinois on Saturday morning, officials said.
The authorities did not say how many people died in the crash, but the Illinois State Police said that it was “an active and ongoing fatal aircraft investigation.”
The plane crashed around 10:15 a.m. in Trilla, which is about 65 miles south of Champaign. Airplane debris was scattered on the roadway, which was closed several hours after the crash, the State Police said.
The plane, a single-engine Cessna 180, crashed about a dozen miles from Coles County Memorial Airport in Mattoon, Ill., the Federal Aviation Administration said.
The F.A.A. and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating. It was unknown whether anyone on the ground was injured.
“We keep those impacted by the plane crash in our thoughts today,” Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois said on social media. “Thank you to the first responders who rushed to the scene.”
In the last week, small plane crashes have killed at least nine people.
On Friday night, a small plane crashed into a river in eastern Nebraska, killing three people on board, officials said. On April 12, a small twin-engine plane crashed in a muddy field in New York, killing all six people on board.
Flying remains the safest mode of transportation, experts say, but an unusual spate of crashes involving commercial airliners at the start of the year has raised travelers’ anxieties about flying.
Adeel Hassan is a reporter and editor on the National Desk. He is a founding member of Race/Related, and much of his work focuses on identity and discrimination. He started the Morning Briefing for NYT Now and was its inaugural writer. He also served as an editor on the International Desk.
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