The plane was supposed to land at Boston Logan on Saturday morning. It never got there.
The jet is a Gulfstream G100, Canadian registration C-GRJP, flown by Latitude Air Ambulance out of Hamilton, Ontario. It left L.F. Wade International Airport in Bermuda overnight on what FlightAware showed as a trip of nearly two hours. Somewhere around 1:30 a.m. Eastern, it stopped talking to controllers. The Coast Guard says it was told about 2 a.m. and started sending aircraft and boats from Cape Cod and Nantucket.
By early Sunday crews had found a debris field. Fox News reported it has been linked to the missing flight. The Coast Guard has not said what is in it, and has not said whether anyone has been found.
Radio recordings posted to LiveATC.net have been circulating since Saturday, and the Associated Press, NBC and The Boston Globe have all listened to them.
On them, the pilot reports electrical problems and declares an emergency as the jet nears the coast. A controller asks whether the crew is "coming in blind." Nantucket's fire rescue dispatcher, passing word to crews on the ground, says the aircraft is about 15 minutes away, has electrical trouble and has lost radio and radar.
Then the controller starts calling around. Anyone else up there see this plane on their collision avoidance display? Can anyone raise it by radio? The call sign was Heartbeat 104. Nobody answered for it again.
NPR, citing flight data, says the jet dropped at least 9,000 feet in about two minutes, flew level for a few minutes after that, and then vanished from tracking. Some other outlets have put the drop higher. The lower figure is the better sourced for now.
Bermuda sits about 650 miles off North Carolina, so the run to Boston is mostly open Atlantic until the last stretch near Cape Cod and the islands. That matters for the search. Anything that went into the water out there is a long way from the nearest help, and the Coast Guard had to bring its assets in from the mainland and Nantucket.
Skyport, which runs the Bermuda airport, says there were four crew and two passengers. Steven MacKinnon, Canada's transport minister, posted on X that four of the six were Canadian. Transport Canada is working with American authorities, he said.
No names yet. The Coast Guard has told reporters the next of kin have been notified, and CBC reports this was not a flight in Ontario's own air ambulance system.
Bermuda's premier, David Burt, called it "deeply worrying." His government says it is in contact with the families.
A lot. Air Station Cape Cod sent planes and a helicopter, and NewsNation counted five fixed-wing aircraft at one point. A 47-foot motor lifeboat went out from Brant Point on Nantucket. The cutter William Sparling, a fast response cutter, stayed on scene through the night.
All of it is concentrated south of the island, which is where the wreckage turned up.
Coast Guard Base Boston has called a press conference. Media have to RSVP and show credentials. That briefing is where the first real detail on what was recovered is likely to come from.
Nobody has said what went wrong, and nobody should guess from radio traffic.
"Electrical problems" is what the pilot saw and reported from the cockpit, in real time, with an emergency unfolding. It can point to a failed generator, a wiring fault, a battery issue, or something that started elsewhere and spread. The weather over that stretch of the Atlantic hasn't been described in anything published so far either. Investigators will need the wreckage, maintenance logs for the jet, and whatever recorders can be recovered before they can say anything firm.
Both the U.S. and Canada will probably have a hand in it, given where the plane is registered and where it came down. No lead agency has been named in the reporting so far.
One more thing worth saying plainly. Latitude Air Ambulance runs a fleet of these jets, with this one among the four G100s it has registered in Ontario. Nothing in what's been published ties the problem to the fleet as a whole
The Coast Guard briefing comes first. After that, probably a formal list of those on board, and word on whether this is still a rescue or has turned into a recovery.
Anyone with information that might help the search is asked to contact the Coast Guard.
