The U.S. Coast Guard says at least five aboard had died.
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 five people, Mexico’s president said Tuesday.
Authorities initially believed the plane had landed safely at its destination in Galveston, near Houston, before learning it had gone down Monday afternoon, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said. A search-and-rescue operation in waters near Galveston pulled two survivors from the plane’s wreckage, while one remained missing, Mexico’s Navy said.
U.S. authorities are investigating the cause, but the National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday that it could take a week or more to recover the aircraft.
“What happened is very tragic,” Sheinbaum said in her morning press briefing, noting that sailors were among the dead. The Mexican Navy officers had been working with a group that transports Mexican children with severe burns to a hospital in Galveston.Plane was too low as it descended
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 fog was so thick that meteorologists estimated only about a half-mile of visibility.
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.
