NEWRY – A light plane carrying a pilot and three passengers on an introductory flight lesson crashed Thursday on a remote western Maine mountainside near the Sunday River ski area, killing everyone aboard.

Wardens and rescuers reached the wreckage on Barker Mountain shortly before dusk and confirmed that there were no survivors.

Officials were deciding whether to attempt to recover the bodies during the night or wait until daylight today, said Jim Peters, spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration.

The names of the dead were not immediately released.

The Cessna 172, operated by Twin Cities Air Service in Auburn, had picked up the passengers at the Bethel airport around midafternoon, an hour or so before the crash.

Twin Cities President Nate Humphrey said the pilot was a 24-year-old certified flight instructor with more than 900 hours of flight experience.

“The flight was being conducted under visual flight rules. No immediate cause can be determined pending a full investigation,” Humphrey said.

An investigator from the National Transportation Safety Board was scheduled to arrive at the scene today.

Six emergency responders reached the scene of the crash around 8 p.m. after five members of the Maine Warden Service used all-terrain vehicles to blaze a trail to the site, said Mark Latti, spokesman for the state Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.

“It’s pretty remote,” Latti said. “It looks like it’s over a mile to the nearest road.”

“We’ve got coordinates of the crash site that were radioed in from another plane, and hopefully we’ll be able to take a fairly direct route to it,” he said.

The plane was 27 years old and was registered to Air Pro Aviation Inc. in Presque Isle and based in Lewiston, according to the FAA Web site.