Search Called Off for Bermuda Medical Jet Lost Off Nantucket

The short version: The U.S. Coast Guard has suspended its search for a medical transport jet and the six people aboard it that disappeared off Nantucket early Saturday morning, October 3, while flying from Bermuda to Boston. On Monday, authorities released the names of all six: four Canadian crew members and two Bermuda nationals — 66-year-old Marilyn Lavonne Bean, who had suffered a stroke and was being flown to Boston for treatment, and her 41-year-old son, Sergio Wayne Lottimore. Latitude Air Ambulance, the Canadian company that operated the flight, says all six are presumed dead.

That is the bare shape of the story, and it is brutal. A woman has a stroke. Her family gets her onto a medical flight — the kind with a nurse and a respiratory therapist onboard, the kind where someone qualified rides beside you the whole way — bound for Boston's hospitals. Her son goes with her. And somewhere over the dark Atlantic, around 2 a.m., the plane falls off the radar. Sixty-six hours of searching later, the Coast Guard finds pieces of the aircraft and no sign of anyone alive, and calls the search off. Everything after this is the detail.

What follows is what happened, in the order it happened, based on statements from the Coast Guard, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Bermuda Police Service, and the air ambulance operator.

The flight that never reached Boston

Shortly before 1:20 a.m. on Saturday, October 3, the FAA issued a search-and-rescue alert notice for a Gulfstream G100, tail number CGRJP, that had departed L.F. Wade International Airport in Bermuda bound for Boston Logan International Airport. The FAA told the Coast Guard's Northeast District it had lost contact with the aircraft around 2 a.m. over the Atlantic.

The plane belonged to Latitude Air Ambulance, a Canadian medical transport company based in Ontario. On board were four crew members — two pilots and two medical staff — plus two passengers from Bermuda. The flight's call sign, the company later said, was Heartbeat 104.

Flight-tracking data shows the jet climbed to about 24,000 feet and held altitude for more than an hour before plunging roughly 13,000 feet in the space of two minutes. Air traffic control audio posted to LiveATC.net suggests the plane may have been flying into a storm shortly before it vanished, and the pilot reported electrical problems and declared an emergency as the jet approached the Massachusetts coast. Whatever happened in those minutes happened fast.

By Saturday, Coast Guard searchers had found a debris field off the coast of Nantucket — the island about 30 miles south of Cape Cod — and confirmed it was associated with the missing jet. The water at the debris site was only 80 to 90 feet deep. That sounds shallow enough to mean something, and it isn't: shallow water tells you where the wreckage is, not where the people are.

66 hours, 4,445 miles, and a call no commander wants to make

What followed was one of the bigger recent search efforts off the Massachusetts coast. Seven crews from Coast Guard units and the New York Air National Guard took part, flying Jayhawk helicopters and HC-144 Ocean Sentry airplanes out of Air Station Cape Cod alongside cutters, boats, and Massachusetts authorities. The search covered about 4,445 miles of ocean over roughly 66 hours — a window that ran from the pre-dawn hours Saturday through Sunday evening.

On Sunday, October 4, the Coast Guard held a news conference where commanders said crews were still focused on finding the six people aboard, keeping families informed as the effort continued. That evening, the agency announced the search was suspended.

"Suspending a search is not an easy decision," Rear Adm. Matthew Lake, commander of the Coast Guard's Northeast District, said in the statement. "We express our deepest condolences to the families and loved ones affected by the tragedy and our gratitude for our partner agencies who helped support search efforts." Next of kin were notified.

Late Sunday, Latitude Air Ambulance released its own statement, and its language was more final than the Coast Guard's. "Given the information shared by authorities and the conclusion of the search-and-rescue phase, we must now face the heartbreaking reality that the four members of our Latitude team, our patient and the patient's family escort, who were aboard Heartbeat 104, are presumed to have died."

The six people aboard

On Monday, October 5, the names came out — first from the Bermuda Police Service, then in a Coast Guard news release. The two passengers were Marilyn Lavonne Bean, 66, and her son Sergio Wayne Lottimore, 41, both Bermuda nationals. Bean had suffered a stroke the week before; the family was flying her to Boston for medical care. A family friend told ABC affiliate WCVB the family wanted people to know Bean was the matriarch of the family in Bermuda, deeply loved across the island community. "The family is devastated," the friend said, "but they are appreciative by the overwhelming support from those that know them in Bermuda and also those who have shown concern from Boston and other areas of Massachusetts."

Lottimore worked in insurance — he was a senior vice president at Hamilton Re, the Bermuda firm that described him as a respected leader, colleague, and friend. Warwick Academy, the Bermuda school he attended, remembered him as a former scholastic prefect and an outstanding person. He flew beside his mother on the trip. That detail matters more than any corporate title.

The four crew members were Canadians employed by Latitude Air Ambulance: Capt. Philip Gregory Childerhose, first officer Thomas Henry Farquhar, flight nurse Sarah Jane Paton, and respiratory therapist Jolene Beth Weir. Peter Byl, the company's president, said of them: "Our colleagues dedicated themselves to helping people at some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives. That was the mission they were carrying out aboard Heartbeat 104. We want their families to know that we will remember not simply how we lost them, but how they lived, how they served, and what they meant to the people around them."

Think about what that crew does for a living. Flight nurses and respiratory therapists on air ambulances spend their careers pulling strangers through the worst hours of their lives. The pilots fly the red-eyes that get sick people to the hospitals that can save them. This was a Saturday-night mercy run, the unglamorous kind, and it ended the same way it began — in service of someone else's emergency.

What happens next

The investigation belongs to Canada. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada announced Monday it will lead the inquiry into the crash, since the aircraft was registered in Canada; under international agreements, the state of registry conducts the investigation, with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board participating as an accredited representative. The TSB said it will deploy investigators in the coming days to assist in the search for and recovery of the aircraft.

There are threads to pull, and investigators will pull them. The steep descent from 24,000 feet in about two minutes. The reported electrical problems and the emergency declaration. The storm the plane appears to have flown into. The flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, if they survive and can be found in 80 feet of Atlantic water, will tell more than any preliminary tracking data can.

For now, though, the immediate facts sit where they are. Six people left Bermuda on a medical flight to Boston in the early hours of October 3. A debris field was found off Nantucket. A 66-hour search found nothing else. And a Bermuda family that sent its matriarch off for lifesaving care in Boston is instead mourning her and the son who went with her — alongside the families of four Canadians whose job was saving lives from the air. Boston's hospitals get medevac flights from Bermuda routinely. This was supposed to be one of those. It is the hardest kind of story: no mystery to solve for the reader, no outrage to aim anywhere, just an ordinary tragedy on an ordinary route, and six names.