A medical transport plane lost contact near Nantucket, off the coast Massachusetts, in the early hours of Saturday, prompting a continuing federal and state search to find the aircraft and the six people who were on board.
A debris field was located hours after the plane went missing.
The plane, a Gulfstream G100, lost communication with the Federal Aviation Administration just after 1 a.m. Eastern time. It was traveling from Bermuda, the British territory off the coast of North Carolina, to Boston.
There were four Canadian citizens and two Bermudian nationals on board.
Here’s what we know:
What Happened
The plane took off from Bermuda’s lone airport, on St. David’s Island, at 11:41 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, according to data from the website FlightAware.
Flight data shows that the air ambulance was flying consistently at an altitude of 24,000 feet before it plummeted several thousand feet around 1:05 a.m.
The F.A.A. lost contact with the plane and issued an alert around 1:20 a.m., activating search operations from the Coast Guard, the Massachusetts authorities and the New York Air National Guard.
The missing plane was operated by an Ontario-based medical evacuation company, Latitude Air Ambulance, which flies people to hospitals and offers repatriation services, according to its website.
On board the plane were two Canadian pilots, two Canadian medical staff members and two Bermuda nationals. All are still unaccounted for.
The plane was reportedly trying to declare an emergency before it lost contact, said Preston Harimon, a spokesman for Nantucket Memorial Airport.
The Search
Officials confirmed at a news briefing on Sunday that a search for the six people on the plane was still underway. The six have not yet been publicly identified.
An interagency effort has canvassed more than 2,800 square miles in 36 hours.
“This is a large and demanding search area,” Rear Adm. Matt Lake of the Coast Guard said on Sunday.
Rescue teams have deployed fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, boats and cutters to aid their search. Crews located a debris field about 20 miles south of Nantucket.
The authorities did not specify what they recovered in the crash area and reiterated that their priority was to find the missing people.
The depth of the water in the area is approximately 80 to 90 feet, Admiral Lake said. The Coast Guard is working with the Massachusetts authorities to use an aircraft equipped with sonar to help with the search.
The Coast Guard did not provide a timeline for when they would call off the operation.
“We’ll continue to search and saturate the area until we’re at the point where we are confident that if there were any survivors remaining on the surface of the water, we would have found them,” Capt. John McTamney said on Sunday.
Cause for Concern
Experts agreed that the plane’s reported rate of descent was unusual and concerning.
According to data from FlightAware, the plane was flying consistently at an altitude of 24,000 feet before it descended around rapidly descending 13,000 feet around 1:05 a.m.
Brad Wheeler, a retired commercial pilot who flew for nearly 40 years and has flown between New York and Bermuda, said the maneuver indicated a “significant problem.”
Mary Schiavo, an aviation lawyer and former inspector general for the Transportation Department, said that the speed adjustment just before the plane’s descent showed the situation had gone awry.
“They were responding to something,” she said.
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