WASHINGTON, March 23 (RIA Novosti) - Seventeen people, most of them children, have died in a plane crash near a cemetery in Montana, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman said.

The Pilatus PC-12 single-engine plane, which was en route to Bozeman, Montana, but rerouted to Butte instead crashed 150 meters short of the runway on Sunday, the spokesman said. The plane had earlier made a stop at Oroville airport, to the north of Sacramento in California, to refuel.

"It looked like a stunt plane," 14-year-old Kenny Gulick told The Montana Standard. "All of a sudden the pilot lost control and went into a nosedive. He couldn't pull out in time and crashed into the trees of the cemetery."

After the crash the plane, which was taking children on a skiing vacation, caught fire, he added. No one was injured on the ground.