Man, along with future father-in-law, killed in plane crash outside Alamogordo

A man and his daughter’s fiancé were killed when the plane they were piloting went down near Alamogordo on Wednesday.

New Mexico State Police in a news release said Ralph Guerin, 73, and Patrick Cheung, 40, were pronounced dead at the crash site.

The cause of the crash is unknown, and the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating.

Ana Guerin, daughter to Ralph and fiancée to Cheung, said the two were sightseeing around Alamogordo in Cheung’s plane, which he was piloting, when it crashed.

“My dad had been looking forward to going on the plane with him,” Ana Guerin told the Journal. “He (Cheung) had just purchased it around July or August.”

Ana Guerin said Cheung had flown the plane from Florida to New Mexico, a 15-hour flight, to visit his future father-in-law.

“It was his dream to make it there on his own plane,” she said.

Cheung worked as head of engineering for the Florida Atlantic University and in his spare time, he began to work on getting his instrument rating license, which allows a pilot to fly under bad conditions or in the dark, Ana Guerin said. Cheung had just passed the license test roughly one month ago.

State Police began investigating Wednesday around 5 p.m. after they were notified by the U.S. Air Force Rescue Coordination Center about a missing plane, according to the release.

The release states the plane, an American Aviation AA-1A, had departed from its “airport of origin” around 11:30 a.m. and was expected to return an hour later.

The last known coordinates of the plane were near the Alamogordo White Sands Regional Airport, according to the release.

Multiple law enforcement agencies assisted in a search for the plane and, on Thursday morning, the crash site was found near Cloudcroft, roughly 30 minutes from the airport.

“It impacted the terrain under unknown circumstances,” said Sarah Sulick, spokesperson for the National Transportation Safety Board.

Ana Guerin said that in his spare time, Cheung ran several small businesses, including an RV Airbnb-style business named Gear Nomad they started together.

Ralph Guerin was a retired Navy pilot who moved across the world after serving in the Vietnam War, Ana Guerin said.

He retired from Holloman Air Force Base in 2019 as an air combat maneuvering instrumentation site manager. Afterward, she said, he spent his days in Alamogordo with his wife and the two celebrated 37 years of marriage on Tuesday.