The plane took off from Bermuda’s lone airport on St David’s Island at 11.41pm Eastern time Friday, according to website FlightAware.
Flight data shows the air ambulance was flying consistently at 24,000 feet (7315m) before it plummeted several thousand feet about 1.05am.
The FAA lost contact with the plane and issued an alert about 1.20am, activating searches by the Coast Guard, Massachusetts authorities and the New York Air National Guard.
The missing plane was operated by an Ontario-based medical evacuation company, Latitude Air Ambulance, which flies people to hospitals and offers repatriation services, according to its website.
On board were two Canadian pilots, two Canadian medical staff members and two Bermuda nationals. All are still unaccounted for.
The plane was reportedly trying to declare an emergency before it lost contact, said Preston Harimon, a spokesperson for Nantucket Memorial Airport.
The search
Officials confirmed a search for the six people on the plane was still underway. The six have not yet been publicly identified.
An interagency effort has canvassed more than 2800 square miles (7252sq km) in 36 hours.
“This is a large and demanding search area,” Rear Admiral Matt Lake of the Coast Guard said.
Rescue teams have deployed fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, boats and cutters to aid their search. Crews located a debris field about 20 miles (32km) south of Nantucket.
Authorities did not specify what they recovered in the crash area and reiterated the priority was to find the missing people.
The depth of the water in the area is about 80 to 90 feet (24-27m), Lake said. The Coast Guard is working with the Massachusetts authorities to use an aircraft equipped with sonar to help with the search.
The Coast Guard did not provide a timeline for calling off the operation.
“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,” Captain John McTamney said.
Cause for concern
Experts agreed that the plane’s reported rate of descent was unusual and concerning.
According to data from FlightAware, the plane was flying consistently at 24,000 feet (7315m) before it rapidly descended 13,000 feet (3962m) about 1.05am.
Brad Wheeler, a retired commercial pilot who flew for nearly 40 years and has flown between New York and Bermuda, said the manoeuvre indicated a “significant problem”.
Mary Schiavo, an aviation lawyer and former inspector general for the Transportation Department, said that the speed adjustment just before the plane’s descent showed the situation had gone awry.
“They were responding to something,” she said.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
Written by: Bernard Mokam and Georgia Gee
Photographs by: US Coast Guard
©2026 THE NEW YORK TIMES
