Six named as presumed dead after a medical jet vanishes off Nantucket

The US Coast Guard has named all six people aboard a Canadian air ambulance that vanished off Nantucket on Saturday. Latitude Air Ambulance, the Ontario operator, said it now has to face what it called the heartbreaking reality that the four crew, the patient and the patient's family escort are presumed to have died. The search has been suspended. Canada's Transportation Safety Board is investigating.

The aircraft was a Gulfstream G100 on a medical flight from Bermuda to Boston. Latitude has owned it since 2018. Air traffic control audio shows the pilot reporting electrical problems and declaring an emergency as the jet approached the coast. Contact was then lost. Searchers found debris about 20 miles off Nantucket. They did not find the six people. On Sunday evening the Coast Guard ended the rescue phase.

The four Canadian crew, all Latitude employees, are Philip Gregory Childerhose, Thomas Henry Farquhar, Sarah Jane Paton and Jolene Beth Weir. The Bermuda Police Service named the two Bermudian passengers as Marilyn Lavonne Bean, 66, and her son Sergio Wayne Lottimore, 41. Officials have said one of them was the patient and one was the family escort. They have not said which was which. That distinction matters to the families and to the insurer. It does not change the search result.

A medical flight is a small aircraft with a specific job. It carries a patient who cannot wait for a scheduled airline, a relative, and a crew trained to keep that patient alive in the cabin. The G100 is a business jet converted to that role, not an airliner. It has no cabin crew in the airline sense, and it does not carry a flight data recorder of the kind the public expects from a passenger jet, though investigators will still look for whatever recorder and wreckage the sea gives up. The electrical-problem call is the last operational fact in the public record. It is not yet a cause.

The geography is unforgiving and well mapped. Nantucket sits south of Cape Cod. Twenty miles offshore is cold Atlantic water in early October, beyond easy reach of a harbour boat and inside the Coast Guard's offshore zone. Debris without bodies, after a suspended search, is why the company used the word presumed. Presumed is a legal and operational status. It is what an operator says when rescue has stopped and recovery has not produced a person.

The investigation now sits with the Transportation Safety Board in Canada because the operator is Canadian, with the US Coast Guard and the Federal Aviation Administration holding the crash site and the radar and radio record. The useful next documents are the radio transcript in full, the maintenance log for the electrical system, and the weather and routing from Bermuda to the last radar point. An emergency call about electrical failure, followed by silence, can mean a loss of instruments and radios, a loss of control, or both. It cannot be sorted from a company statement.

Bean and Lottimore were on the aircraft because someone in Bermuda decided a Boston hospital could not wait. The four crew were there because that is the job. Six names are now public. The wreckage that would explain the electrical call is still on the seabed, about 20 miles off an island whose harbour could not bring them home.