Coast Guard names six presumed dead after the Bermuda medical jet fell off Nantucket

The U.S. Coast Guard has named the six people aboard a Canadian air ambulance that left Bermuda for Boston early on Saturday and never arrived. Latitude Air Ambulance, the Ontario company that operated the flight as Heartbeat 104, said late on Sunday that the four crew, the patient and the patient's family escort are presumed dead. The Coast Guard suspended the search on Sunday evening after debris was found off Nantucket.

The aircraft was a Gulfstream G-100. It departed L.F. Wade International Airport in Bermuda just after 12.40am local time and was due at Boston Logan around 1.12am, FlightAware records cited by CNN show. The Federal Aviation Administration issued a search-and-rescue alert at about 1.20am. FlightAware data showed the jet holding 24,000 feet for more than an hour, then losing 13,000 feet in about two minutes. Debris was later found off Nantucket, about 30 miles south of Cape Cod.

The four Canadian crew, all Latitude employees, are Philip Gregory Childerhose, Thomas Henry Farquhar, Sarah Jane Paton and Jolene Beth Weir. The Coast Guard said the other two people on board were Bermudian nationals, the patient and a family escort. Next of kin have been notified. Canada's Transportation Safety Board is investigating, with the Coast Guard saying it will keep supporting the Canadian inquiry after the search phase ended.

What the descent record does and does not show

A loss of 13,000 feet in two minutes is not a normal descent. It is the public trace that turned a missing-aircraft notice into a crash inquiry. It does not, by itself, identify a cause. The Gulfstream G-100 is a small business jet used here as a medical transport, with two pilots and two medical staff for one patient and one escort. Latitude's statement, carried by Reuters, said the company had to face the reality that all six were presumed to have died, given what authorities had shared and the end of the search.

The geography is awkward for a quick recovery. The track ends in the water south of Nantucket, not on the island and not on the approach to Logan. A suspended search means the Coast Guard has stopped looking for survivors. It does not mean the wreck has been mapped. The TSB investigation will depend on whether the recorders and enough of the airframe can be found in that water, and on the maintenance and duty records Latitude and the Bermuda departure airport can produce.

A medical flight is a different ledger

Heartbeat 104 was not a scheduled passenger service. It was a transfer of a patient from Bermuda to Boston, with a family member aboard. The two Bermudian dead are a patient who was already ill enough to need an air ambulance and a relative who went along. The four Canadian dead are the people paid to make that transfer. Latitude has praised the crew in its statements. The operational question for the company and for the TSB is narrower: why a jet that had been level at 24,000 feet for more than an hour then fell 13,000 feet in two minutes, and whether that fall began with the aircraft, the weather, or a medical emergency in the cabin that the record cannot yet separate.

Boston was the planned end of a flight that lasted, on the scheduled times, a little over half an hour from wheels-up to wheels-down. The alert went out at 1.20am, minutes after the planned arrival. By Sunday evening the search was over and the company had used the word presumed. The six names are now public. The cause is not. The next document that will move this story is a TSB preliminary note on the descent, or a recovery report from the water off Nantucket.