A MAJOR investigation is underway after two men died when their light aircraft hurtled into the ground in North Yorkshire at the weekend.

The bright yellow plane came down in a ploughed field near Castle Howard, slamming down on its belly not far from the man A64 York to Scarborough road.

Two die as light aircraft crashes 200 metres from homes near Castle Howard

The crash happened at around 10.40am on Saturday and emergency services rushed to the scene – but both the pilot and his passenger had been killed.

The aircraft was a Slingsby T67 Firefly – a two-seater built locally at Kirkbymoorside – and at least one report suggested it could have been attempting to make a crash landing.

The names of the dead have still to be released but both were experienced flyers who had chartered the aircraft from the Full Sutton Flying Centre near York.

A spokesman at the centre said the two men had been planning to do a local flight and a “bit of aerobatics” – something the aircraft was designed to do.

“We were all a bit stunned when we heard what had happened – but flyers are a fairly stoic group,” he said.

Experts from the Air Accident Investigation Branch are now trying to piece together exactly what went wrong with the flight. Among the issues they will try to determine is whether the aircraft was performing any aerobatic manoeuvres in the moments before the crash.

Superintendent Mark Grange, from North Yorkshire Police, said the plane had come down more than 200m away from the nearest houses and was still mostly intact.

Speaking at the scene after it had been secured he said: “It looks like it came straight down,” he said.

“It looks like an aircraft, with two wings and a tail fin where it should be. It's in a bad way and it's obviously come down heavily. It’s sat on its underside so it has not flipped.

“Whether they tried to land like that I don't know.”

The Slingsby T67 Firefly is an aerobatic training aircraft built by Slingsby Aviation in Kirkbymoorside and has been used by a number of the world’s air forces.

The RAF used the type as a basic trainer for 15 years until 2010 and Prince Harry was among those who learned to fly in one.

It is believed the single-engined aircraft was not fitted with a flight data recorder although the pilots may have filmed their journey with a GoPro-style camera.