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Debris: Investigators on Saturday examined parts of the cockpit found near Stagecoach, Nevada.
Photo:
Jason Bean / dpa
The first calls to the Lyon County Sheriff's Office came in just after 9 p.m., US media reports.
Several callers had observed that something may have crashed in the mountains southeast of Reno.
Employees from the sheriff's office and rescue workers from the local fire department immediately began the search.
Two hours later, there was first certainty: A plane had crashed near Stagecoach, Nevada, a rural region with around 2,500 inhabitants.
During the night it became clear that it was an ambulance aircraft operated by the commercial operator Care Flight.
The company confirmed the crash in a press statement on Saturday morning.
Five people, including a patient and family member, the pilot, and a paramedic and nurse, died in the one crash.
Barry Duplantis, chief executive of the company, said Saturday afternoon that the families of all five victims had been notified, the Reno Gazette Journal reported.
"We offer our deepest condolences to their families," Duplantis said.
Care Flight and its sister company Guardian Flight have suspended all flights until further notice.
Care Flight is a small, medium-sized service provider that offers medical transport using four helicopters, one plane and one ambulance.
The plane that crashed is a Pilatus PC-12.
The aircraft type, which has been sold since 1991, is considered an extremely flexible aircraft.
It is used as a cargo, passenger and military aircraft.
In its size class, the PC-12 has been the world's best-selling aircraft for several years, with over 1,800 units sold.
The crashed machine was put into service in 2002.
It is not yet officially clear why the plane crashed.
The local authorities refer to the investigations of the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration, which sent an investigative team to Nevada on Saturday.
But it is also clear that a winter storm was announced for the period of the crash and warnings were given against travel.
At the time of the crash, a warning of potentially dangerous winter weather with gusts of up to 105 km/h and the risk of a "whiteout", i.e. extremely heavy snowfall, was in effect for the region.
Although only 40 kilometers as the crow flies from the city of Reno, which has a population of 260,000, the plane landed in a remote, sparsely populated area: Stagecoach, Nevada, is on Highway 50 at an altitude of around 1200 meters in a valley between mountains that rise another 1000 meters higher.
On the evening of the crash, ground temperatures in the crash area fell to minus 18 degrees with relatively heavy snowfall that brought five centimeters of fresh snow.
Extreme values for this part of Nevada, which is considered to be very dry and where temperatures rarely drop below -5 degrees Celsius.
Nevada is east of the US state of California, which was hit by the same weather pattern over the weekend.
The city of Los Angeles issued a snowstorm warning for the first time in 34 years on Friday.
The winter storm is forecast to move diagonally across the United States from the southwest to northeast, from California to the Canadian border.
It had already been feared in advance that the storm would make travel in the affected areas impossible.
pat/AP