Coast Guard names six people missing from the Nantucket medical flight

The US Coast Guard has named the six people aboard Latitude Air Ambulance flight Heartbeat 104, a medical jet that left Bermuda for Boston before dawn on Saturday and is now the subject of a recovery rather than a search. The four Canadian crew, employed by the Hamilton, Ontario operator, are Philip Gregory Childerhose, Thomas Henry Farquhar, Sarah Jane Paton and Jolene Beth Weir. The two Bermudian passengers are Marilyn Lavonne Bean, 66, and her son Sergio Wayne Lottimore, 41. Bermuda police said a family liaison officer is with their relatives. Bean was the patient or the escort in the company's pairing of "our patient and the patient's family escort." The Coast Guard list does not assign those two roles between mother and son.

The aircraft was a Gulfstream G-100. It left L.F. Wade International Airport in Bermuda just after 12.40am local time, bound for Boston Logan, with a scheduled arrival around 1.12am Eastern. The Federal Aviation Administration issued a search-and-rescue alert at about 1.20am. FlightAware data showed the jet at 24,000 feet for more than an hour, then a drop of 13,000 feet in about two minutes. Debris was later found about 32 kilometres, or 20 miles, off Nantucket. The Coast Guard searched roughly 7,000 square kilometres of ocean and suspended the search on Sunday evening.

Who has the investigation

Latitude Air Ambulance said that, with the search phase over, it had to face the "heartbreaking reality" that the four crew, the patient and the family escort are presumed to have died. Rear Adm. Matthew Lake, commander of the Coast Guard's Northeast District, thanked the crews and partner agencies and said the service would support Canadian partners in the investigation. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada is leading that investigation. Bermuda police said US and Canadian transportation authorities are both on the file. Andrew Murdoch, the governor of Bermuda, and premier David Burt issued condolences. Murdoch noted that the flight was a medical mission.

A medevac jet is a small crew and a narrow cabin: two pilots, two medical staff, a patient and one escort is a full load on a G-100 configured for a stretcher. The four names from Latitude match that crew plan. The two Bermuda names match the patient-and-escort plan. What is still missing is a cause. A descent of 13,000 feet in two minutes from 24,000 feet can be a loss of control, a structural failure, a medical emergency in the cockpit, or a deliberate descent that was not recovered. The TSB will want radar, any radio call, and whatever the recovery brings up. The Coast Guard has ended the search. It has not ended the case.

Why the names changed the story

Until Sunday the public record was an aircraft type, a route and a debris field. Naming Bean and Lottimore, with ages, moves the loss from a flight number to a household in Bermuda. Naming the four Canadians does the same for a company based in Hamilton that flies patients across the western Atlantic as a business. Heartbeat 104 is the call sign Latitude used. The presumption of death is the company's, grounded in the Coast Guard's decision to stop searching. A body count has not been announced. The six names are the list the families now have.