Coast Guard officials located a debris field in the waters about 20 miles south of Nantucket a day after a plane went missing. It remains a search and rescue case to find the passengers of the plane.
The Coast Guard started to respond at approximately 2 am Saturday when they were notified by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that they had lost contact. The aircraft, a Gulfstream G100 (tail number C-GRJP) air ambulance transport aircraft, had six people on board, four Canadian nationals and two citizens of Bermuda.
“During the search, Coast Guard crews were successfully able to locate a debris field that’s been now determined to be associated with the missing aircraft,” Coast Guard Northeast District Commander Matt Lake said in a press conference Sunday, Oct. 4 at 11 am. “Our search remains ongoing.”
The Coast Guard, New York National Guard and their Air Rescue Wing as well as Massachusetts authorities have searched approximately 2,840 square miles over 53.5 hours. The debris field was located in an area 80 to 90 feet deep.
“We’re in the process of working with Massachusetts authorities to get some craft out there that are equipped with sonar to be able to do some detection on the seabed floor,” Lake said.
The current priority, Lake said, is to locate the six people on board, and they’ve kept “next of kin notified of the progress of our search efforts.”
The plane was traveling from Bermuda to Boston, and the FAA issued a search and rescue alert notice at around 1:20 am Saturday, Oct. 3. The plane departed from L.F. Wade International Airport in Bermuda and was headed to Boston Logan International Airport.
A press release from Preston Harimon, airport manager of Nantucket Memorial Airport, said that the “aircraft reportedly declared an emergency prior to the loss of contact.”
There isn’t an exact number of items in the debris field, Lt. Commander Kastriot Kastrati said at the press conference, but the amount of debris has made it hard to “get into the details of what’s there.” The black box, an aircraft’s flight recorder, hasn’t been located yet.
The Coast Guard didn’t have the information of what medical facility the air ambulance was headed to when it went missing.
Lt. Commander John McTamney said the weather, from a search perspective, has been favorable. Winds at 15 to 20 knots and three-foot sea. “All assets on scene and in the air have been able to effectively search the area,” he said at the press conference. Fixed-wing aircraft, rotary-wing aircraft, and boats have been used to search the “rather large area.”
“We have sufficient assets where we are saturating the area again, hoping to find those survivors,” he said.
“We’ll continue to search and saturate the area until we’re at the point where we are confident that if there were any survivors remaining on the surface of the water, we would have found them,” he added.
The Nantucket Current reported Saturday that Nantucket Police and Nantucket Harbormaster are also searching along the South Shore of the island.
