Four members of a family who ran a large farm in North Carolina that supplied markets and hosted local vendor festivals were killed Monday afternoon when the small plane they were in crashed, officials said.

The plane went down about 1:30 p.m. in a field in Lee County in central North Carolina near the Raleigh Executive Jetport in Sanford, the State Highway Patrol said.

Travis W. Buchanan and Candace Buchanan, both 35, and their children, Aubrey, 10, and Walker, 9, were the only occupants in the airplane, it said.

Three of the four occupants died at the crash site, and the fourth person was pronounced dead at a hospital, the Highway Patrol said.

Travis Buchanan was piloting the Cirrus SR22T, a small single-engine aircraft, which took off from Merritt Island, Florida, at 11 a.m. When it was several miles south of the airport in Sanford, the airport received a notification that the plane was losing radio communications, an official said.

— The New York Times