Coast Guard ends the search for six people on a Bermuda to Boston air ambulance

The U.S. Coast Guard suspended the search on Sunday night for six people aboard a Canadian-registered air ambulance that disappeared early Saturday on a flight from Bermuda to Boston. Rear Admiral Matthew Lake, commander of the Coast Guard's northeast district, said suspending a search was not an easy decision, and offered condolences to the families. Crews had covered more than 4,400 miles in 66 hours. The Globe and Mail put the same effort at more than 7,100 kilometres of ocean.

Bermuda police on Monday named two of the six. They are Marilyn Lavonne Bean, 66, and her son, Sergio Wayne Lottimore, 41, both Bermudian. The other four were Canadian crew: two pilots and two medical staff, according to the airport operator and the Coast Guard's account of the load. The jet was carrying a patient and a family member. Next of kin had already been told while the search was still active.

The aircraft and the route

The aircraft was a Gulfstream G100 operated by Latitude Air Ambulance, based in Hamilton, Ontario, the Globe and Mail reported. It left L.F. Wade International Airport in Bermuda after midnight on Saturday for a flight scheduled at one hour and 44 minutes. Skyport, the airport operator, said four crew and two passengers were aboard. The same jet had flown the Bermuda-Boston route six times since early July. The Federal Aviation Administration reported loss of contact at about 2 a.m. Saturday. Tracking data cited by World News Group showed a sharp drop from about 24,000 feet. No further radio call was recorded after a controller asked the crew to confirm they were coming in blind.

Searchers found a debris field off Nantucket later on Saturday. Lake said the water there was 80 to 90 feet deep. Fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, boats and cutters took part, including the New York National Guard's Air Rescue Wing and Massachusetts authorities. A cutter kept working overnight into Sunday. The decision to stop active search came on Sunday night. Suspension is not a formal finding of cause. It is a judgment that further surface search will not recover anyone alive.

What the radio suggested

Air traffic audio posted by LiveATC, and reported by The Independent, indicates the pilot reported electrical problems and declared an emergency as the jet neared the coast, with a storm ahead. Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general at the U.S. Transportation Department, told NBC Boston that a large descent into a storm, with instruments lost, is a setting in which a crew can become disoriented about turn, climb and descent. That is an outside reading of the radio record, not a finding by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada or the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. Neither board had published a cause by Monday.

The depth of the debris field matters for what comes next. At 80 to 90 feet, wreckage is within reach of divers and small remotely operated vehicles, unlike a deep-ocean loss. A recovery, if one is ordered, would be a separate operation from the search for survivors. The Coast Guard has not said whether that recovery is underway. Latitude has not published a passenger manifest beyond the categories already given by Skyport and Bermuda police.

Who was named, and who was not

Bean and Lottimore are the only names released by Monday. The four Canadian crew have not been named in the Coast Guard statements carried by NBC Boston. Families of air-ambulance crews often hear first through the operator. The public record, for now, stops at nationality and role.

The route is a regular medical link, not a one-off charter. Bermuda has no equivalent of a full tertiary hospital for every case, and Boston is the usual receiving city for urgent transfers. Six prior trips by this jet since July show the sector was in ordinary use. The failure mode suggested by the radio, an electrical problem followed by loss of contact and a debris field in shallow water off Nantucket, is specific enough for investigators to start with the generators, the standby instruments and the weather return from that hour. Until they do, the only settled facts are the load, the two Bermudian names, the debris field, and the decision to stop looking for survivors.