A Cessna training aircraft collided with a passenger plane carrying 44 people above Kenya’s capital Nairobi on Tuesday, killing the student and his trainer, police said.

The passenger plane from local airline Safarilink, bound for the coastal resort town of Diani, had just taken off when it “experienced a loud bang”, Safarilink said in a statement.

It was able to turn back and land at Nairobi’s Wilson Airport and there were no casualties aboard, the airline said.

According to a BBC report, the aircraft, belonging to a flying school crashed in Nairobi National Park, killing the two people. The Safarilink passenger plane returned to Nairobi’s Wilson Airport from where it had taken off with 44 people on board.

The 39 passengers and five crew members were all unharmed, the airline said. The aircraft, bound for Diani on Kenya’s coast, had “experienced a loud bang soon after take-off”, it said.

Reuters report that Nairobi county police commander Adamson Bugei said a flight student and a trainer were killed aboard the smaller plane. However, he did not provide additional details.

Photos of the crash site published by Kenyan media showed a small smashed-up plane lying in the tall grass of Nairobi National Park, a large wildlife reserve near Wilson Airport.

The Safarilink plane was a Dash 8, the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority said in a statement, adding that investigations were under way.

The Cessna plane operated by Ninety-Nines Flying School crashed in the game park about 10km (six miles) from the airport. The Kenya Civil Aviation Authority (KCAA) said the accident had taken place at around 10:05 local time (07:05 GMT) on Tuesday.

Its air accidents department and the police had begun an investigation into the cause of the accident, it said. Wilson Airport is a small but very busy airport in the capital that mostly serves domestic flights.

There have been a number of accidents over the years involving small aircraft from the airport.

• A Tell report