Six people are still missing after a medical jet flying a patient from Bermuda to Boston went down in the Atlantic south of Nantucket early Saturday. The Coast Guard has found a debris field from the plane. As of Sunday, it hadn’t found any of the people on board.
Coast Guard officials told reporters in Boston on Sunday that they’ll keep looking until they’re sure no one is left on the surface of the water. Nobody’s calling it a recovery yet. But the language has started to shift.
What happened to the medical plane?
The jet, a Gulfstream G100 run by Latitude Air Ambulance of Hamilton, Ontario, left Bermuda late Friday night for the roughly 800-mile flight to Boston Logan. On board were a Bermudian patient, a relative of the patient, and a Canadian crew of four: two pilots and two medical workers. The Bermuda Gazette reported the passengers were a patient and their son.
For most of the flight, the plane cruised at about 24,000 feet. As it neared Nantucket, the pilot reported electrical failures, according to radio recordings reviewed by the Boston Globe. One air traffic controller asked, “You’re coming in blind? Is that what you said?” The pilot did declare an emergency, but controllers struggled to hear the transmissions.
Around 1:04 a.m., flight-tracking data shows the jet dropped about 13,000 feet in three minutes. Shortly after that, it vanished from radar. Emergency crews at Logan had lined up on the runway to meet it. At 1:20 a.m., the FAA issued an alert. By about 1:36, the tower had lost the plane on radar, and the crews were sent back.
Is anyone still searching for survivors?
Yes. Coast Guard planes and helicopters from Cape Cod and Elizabeth City, North Carolina, a cutter and a lifeboat from Nantucket have covered close to 3,000 square miles, with help from the New York National Guard and Massachusetts agencies. The debris was confirmed Saturday, but searchers haven’t found the plane’s black box.
Our priority is to locate the six personnel and aircraft.
Rear Adm. Matthew Lake, commander of the Coast Guard’s Northeast district
Capt. John McTamney, the district’s response chief, said the search would go on “until we’re at the point where if there were any survivors on the surface of the water, we’re confident we would have found them.” That’s how the Coast Guard talks when the odds are getting long. The water off Massachusetts is around 55 degrees this time of year, CBC News reported, and a retired Canadian search coordinator told CBC that people on a flight like this typically wouldn’t be wearing life jackets.
Who’s investigating, and what don’t we know yet?
- The NTSB is monitoring, and Canadian officials are in touch with U.S. authorities. Canada’s transport minister, Steven MacKinnon, hasn’t identified the people on board.
- Officials won’t speculate on a cause. The pilot’s report of electrical problems is the only clue made public so far.
- Bermuda Premier David Burt said, “We are praying that all six people will be found safe.”
It’s the second small-plane search over the Atlantic we’ve covered in a month. In September, all four people aboard a plane lost near the Bahamas were confirmed dead.
The BeezLoop Take
The Coast Guard is handling this the right way. Officials haven’t oversold the odds, and they haven’t given up early. McTamney’s line about being “confident we would have found them” is an honest way of preparing families for bad news without saying it before the evidence does.
The question that matters now is the electrical failure. Air ambulances fly sick people long distances over open water, often at night, and the passengers don’t get to choose the plane. If the electrical failure the pilot reported knocked out key systems over open ocean, investigators need to say why, and whether the same thing could happen on the next flight. That answer depends on finding the recorders.
The open question: what happened in the cockpit between the first call about electrical trouble and the three-minute drop?
Also on BeezLoop: a charter plane crash near a remote Alaska radar site killed all 8 aboard, and a news helicopter crash in Los Angeles killed its pilot and a photojournalist.
Sources: Boston Globe · CBS News · CBC News · NPR · NBC10 Boston
