Five killed in Texas plane crash en route to pickleball tournament
Five members of an Amarillo pickleball community died when their Cessna 421C went down near Wimberley, a routine trip to New Braunfels ending in flames.
Five people heading from Amarillo to a pickleball tournament in New Braunfels died when their six-seat Cessna 421C crashed in the Wimberley area of Hays County, turning an ordinary overnight trip into a fatal wreck in the Texas Hill Country.
Emergency crews were called to the 200 block of Round Rock Road around 11:05 p.m. Thursday, April 30, 2026, and law enforcement, fire and EMS arrived about 12 minutes later, officials said. The crash site was near Wimberley, about 40 miles southwest of Austin, where responders found the plane destroyed and all five people aboard dead.
Hays County Judge Ruben Becerra identified the aircraft as a Cessna 421C and said preliminary information indicated it was traveling at a high rate of speed when it hit the ground around 11 p.m. Officials said the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate. A second aircraft traveling in the area landed safely, underscoring how narrow the margin can be in small-aircraft travel even when other planes in the same airspace complete their trips.
The Amarillo Pickleball Club later identified the victims as Seren Wilson, Brooke Skypala, Stacy Hedrick, Glen Appling and Hayden Dillard. The club said the five were part of its community and were on their way to the tournament when the crash occurred. Their deaths immediately rippled through Amarillo’s pickleball circles, where teammates and friends faced the abrupt loss of people known more for shared courts and travel plans than for any public profile.
Witnesses near the crash described hearing a loud boom and seeing flames. One nearby resident told local television that she heard an engine-like noise before the plane went down. Those accounts, combined with the reported speed at impact, will likely be central as investigators work to reconstruct the final seconds of the flight.
The crash adds to concern about small-aircraft safety in Texas Hill Country, where rural terrain, nighttime operations and fast-changing conditions can complicate emergency response and accident review. For the victims’ families and their community in Amarillo, the focus now is on grief, support and the long investigation that follows every fatal plane crash.
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