Air traffic controllers lost communication for about 10 minutes with a small Mexican navy plane carrying a young medical patient and seven others before it crashed off the Texas coast in thick fog, killing at least six people, Mexico's government said Tuesday. The plane was working with a nonprofit group transporting Mexican children with severe burns to a hospital in Galveston, near Houston, when it crashed Monday afternoon. Authorities believed the plane had landed, but the flight had lost contact with air controllers, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Tuesday. The plane crashed in a bay near the base of the causeway connecting Galveston Island to the mainland.
Teams found the bodies of five people and pulled two survivors from the plane's wreckage, then set off on a daylong search in the waters near Galveston for 29-year-old navy Lt. Luis Enrique Castillo, the AP reports. Castillo's family in their rural town in southern Mexico were left scrambling for answers. "We don't know what to do," his father, Eduard Castillo, said Tuesday. "All we can do is wait. We can't go to the United States, we have no visa." The search came to an end Tuesday night when search teams found Castillo's body. Castillo and his wife were expecting a baby in three months. "Now he's never going to meet his unborn child," Eduard Castillo said as his family hugged and sobbed around him.
- US authorities are investigating the cause. The National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday that it could take a week or more to recover the aircraft.
- As the twin turboprop Beech King Air 350i approached Sholes International Airport in Galveston, radar shows it was far too low, said Jeff Guzzetti, a former NTSB and Federal Aviation Administration crash investigator. A navigation system for the runway where the plane was supposed to land had been out of service for about a week, Guzzetti said. The system sends signals to the airplane cockpit that helps pilots navigate in the kind of bad weather that had enveloped the area.
- The pilot should have aborted the landing if the runway wasn't visible at an altitude of 205 feet, climbing back up before trying again or looking for another airport entirely, Guzzetti said; the reported radar track shows that the pilot was descending rapidly below 200 feet, a full 2 miles from the runway. "Maybe there was some sort of mechanical malfunction," he said. "But just looking at the recorded flight track and comparing it with the weather and the airport equipment outage, seems to me that this landing approach should never have occurred."
- A spokesperson for the NTSB told the AP that investigators will review maintenance records, weather forecasts, and air traffic control communications. A preliminary report is expected within 30 days. Guzzetti said the investigation also will likely look into how serious the young patient's medical condition was and how motivated the pilot was to land. "There have been previous accidents in the air medical community where pilots try to push their luck in order to save the patient," he said.
- Mexico's navy said the plane was helping with a medical mission in coordination with the Michou and Mau Foundation. The charity was founded after a mother died trying to save her kids from a fire. One child died, while another survived after receiving treatment at Shriners Children's Texas in Galveston. Over 23 years, the foundation has helped transfer more than 2,000 patients to that hospital and other medical facilities with burn expertise, according to the charity's website.
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