Medical plane goes missing carrying 6 people from Bermuda to Boston
The plane, with four Canadians on board and two people picked up in Bermuda, lost contact shortly after 1 a.m. A search was underway Saturday off the coast of Nantucket, Mass.
The U.S. Coast Guard was searching Saturday for a medical transfer plane that went missing while flying from Bermuda to Boston with six people on board, officials said.
The search began after the Federal Aviation Administration issued an alert around 1:20 a.m. after losing contact with the plane, a Gulfstream G100. The search was taking place off the coast of Nantucket on Saturday, the Coast Guard said, adding that they had deployed planes, a helicopter and two boats, some sent from a station in Cape Cod, Mass.
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 people — including a patient — whom the plane had picked up in Bermuda, according to Clarence Togeretz, the air ambulance company’s operations manager.
The plane took off from Bermuda’s lone airport, on St. David’s Island, at 11:41 p.m. Eastern time, according to data from the website FlightAware. It appears to have been flying consistently at an altitude of 24,000 feet before descending several thousand feet around 1:05 a.m.
Aviation experts said that the reported rate of the descent was unusual.
“I would say that indicates a significant problem,” said Brad Wheeler, a retired commercial pilot who flew for nearly 40 years and has flown between New York and Bermuda.
Another expert agreed.
“It’s clear they had something going wrong because they adjusted the speed just before the drop,” said Mary Schiavo, an aviation lawyer and former inspector general for the Transportation Department. “They were responding to something.”
The plane was far north of the area known as the Bermuda Triangle, the mythical region of the Atlantic Ocean where planes and ships are said to have disappeared. Bermuda, a self-governing British territory, is home to 65,000 people and is about 780 miles from Boston.
The plane had made several trips in recent weeks, including another flight between Bermuda and Boston on Sept. 24. It had also flown several times within Canada, and made one trip from Ontario to San Francisco and back.
Recent photographs of the aircraft show it is mostly white with a black decal down the side and a red “star of life” medical symbol on the tail, as well as a Canadian flag.
The plane was manufactured in Israel in 1996, records show, and it appears to have previously been used as a private jet.
Latitude operates 10 planes, according to its website, including four Gulfstream G100s, which are typically staffed with a nurse and a respiratory therapist. The planes have ICU equipment, and some flights may also include a physician. It was unclear if the six people on board were all staff members or if the flight also included patients.
Several other medical planes have crashed in the U.S. in recent years.
One crashed in New Mexico during a short flight in May, killing four. In December, six people were killed when a Mexican navy plane crashed into Galveston Bay in Texas. And in January 2025, a medical plane crashed near the Roosevelt Mall in Northeast Philadelphia, killing all six people on board and one on the ground.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
