One man was killed and another taken to hospital in life-threatening condition after a plane crash in central Alberta late Saturday afternoon.
The crash happened in a rural area east of Lacombe. Blackfalds RCMP said officers responded to a distress beacon from an aircraft at 4:45 p.m.
A downed plane was located in a remote area of Lacombe County near the intersection of Range Road 241 and Township Road 412, where RCMP said two people were found inside a small plane.
The Lacombe Flying Club confirmed the plane took off from the Lacombe Airport and said the pilot was a member of the aviation club, but did not identify the people involved.
Officers arrived to find the pilot had died, while a man who was a passenger had suffered grave injuries and had to be extracted from the wreckage.
STARS air ambulance responded to the crash involving the fixed-wing aircraft around 5:30 p.m., and transported the passenger to the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton in critical condition.
The Transportation Safety Board has deployed a team of investigators to the scene.
Global News has reached out to the TSB for more information.
RCMP said Transport Canada is currently investigating the crash and the cause remains unknown.
The identities of both men are not being released at this time due to the next of kin notification process, RCMP said Sunday morning.
Westlock airport crash
A second plane crash happened late Sunday morning, when a plane carrying four people flipped and sustained serious damage at the Westlock Regional Airport north of Edmonton.
STARS Air Ambulance said it airlifted a 60-year-old man in critical condition to the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton.
Alberta Health Services and RCMP said the other three patients were transported by ground ambulance to hospital in stable condition.
A Daher-Socata TBM-910 six-seater single-turboprop plane with the tail number C-FFYM was seen laying upside down beside the runway on Sunday afternoon.
According to data from Flight Aware and FlightRadar24, the plane took off from Vernon, B.C. and made a stop at the Springbank Airport near Calgary before carrying on to Westlock around 10 a.m.
The four-year-old plane is registered to a numbered company in the Granite Ridge community just west of Calgary, and based out of the Springbank Airport, according to Transport Canada registration data.
Transport Canada has been notified and will take the lead on the investigation, RCMP said, adding the cause of that crash is unknown.