The unnamed victims were on a single-engine Mooney M20S which had taken off from Johnson County Executive Airport in Olathe.

Video showed the plane in a field adjacent to the airport, between 151st Street between Pflumm Road and Quivira Road, RTV6 Indianapolis reported.

The plane was on fire when first responders arrived. Tony Molinaro, an FAA spokesman said that the plane crashed “under unknown circumstances” and was destroyed in the post-crash fire.

An initial investigation of the accident site by the Federal Aviation Administration [FAA] found that there was fuel leaking from one of the wings.

Flight data is not yet available, but the pilot had taken off at 4.03 p.m. on Tuesday, and was heading for Arkansas.

Olathe Fire Capt. Mike Hall told a press conference, “You could see a black cauldron of smoke as you approached the airport,” adding, “It’s a sad sight,” ABC News reported. Newsweek has contacted the FAA for comment.

Deputy Director for the Johnson County Airport Commission Larry Pete said the airport would be closed for a couple of days, pending further investigation by officials from the FAA and the the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

It comes only days after five people were killed when a small plane crashed in Louisiana. The two-engine Piper Cheyenne that was heading to a football game in Atlanta crashed about a mile away from Lafayette Regional Airport in a field next to a post office on Saturday morning.

Steven Ensminger Jr. told ABC News that it was only after the death of his wife, Carley McCord, that he had discovered a text saying, “I love you” which she had sent before the plane took off.

“It’s the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing I think about when I finally fall asleep,” Ensminger told the network.

A sixth person who was aboard the plane is in a critical condition in hospital.

A day later, a small plane crashed into a house near Washington, D.C., killing the pilot. At the time of the accident, no one was in the house in the neighborhood of Lanham in the north-east of the city, and no one else was injured, Fox News reported.

Figures released in November showed that the number of plane fatalities in the U.S. in 2018 had increased by 13 percent from the previous year. The NTSB report showed that in 2018, 393 people had died in civil aviation accidents, compared with 347 in 2017.