Rescuers hoist final survivor into helicopter with just minutes of fuel remaining as a thunderstorm approached
2-MIN READ2-MIN ListenReutersPublished: 12:04pm, 14 May 2026All 11 people aboard a private plane that crashed at sea off central Florida survived the wreck and were rescued from their lifeboat hours later by a US Air Force Reserve team, US Coast Guard and US Air Force officials said on Wednesday.
“For all those people to survive is pretty miraculous,” US Air Force Major Elizabeth Piowaty, commander of one of the aircraft involved in the rescue, told reporters at a news briefing a day after Tuesday’s crash.
The ill-fated plane, a twin-engined turboprop flying from the Bahamas with 11 adults on board, went down in the Atlantic about 129km off Melbourne, Florida, activating an emergency locator signal that was picked up by the US Coast Guard.
Piowaty’s HC-130J Combat King II, a plane designed for combat search and rescue, was already airborne on a training mission when the search was initiated, and her crew immediately joined the operation, according to the US Coast Guard.
The major said her team spotted the life raft as a thunderstorm was approaching and dropped a package of food, water and additional flotation to sustain the survivors until rescuers could reach them in the water.
By then the survivors “had already been in the raft for about five hours, and we could tell just by looking at them they were in distress, physically, mentally, emotionally,” US Air Force Captain Rory Whipple, one of the pararescuers, recalled at the briefing.
