Seoul |A South Korean navy plane with four crew members crashed during a training flight on Thursday, killing at least two and leaving emergency workers searching for the others, the navy said.

The P-3 patrol plane took off from its base in the southeastern city of Pohang at 1:43 pm but fell to the ground due to unknown reasons, the navy said in a statement.

Cho Young-sang, a navy officer overseeing the search efforts, said in a televised briefing that workers found the bodies of two crew members and were preparing to transfer them to a nearby hospital. He said workers were continuing to search for the other two.

There were no immediate reports of civilian casualties on the ground. The navy said in a statement that it established a task force to investigate the cause of the crash and temporarily suspended all flights of P-3s.

An emergency office in Pohang said that rescuers and fire trucks were dispatched to the site after receiving reports from residents that an aircraft crashed on a hill near an apartment complex and caused a fire.

Photos showed firefighters and emergency vehicles near the crash site with flames flickering as a smoke engulfed trees. Fire crews sprayed water on what appeared to be the aircraft debris.

In December, a Jeju Air passenger plane crashed at Muan International Airport in southern South Korea, killing all but two of the 181 people on board. It was one of the deadliest disasters in South Korea's aviation history.