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 the plane crashed Monday afternoon. Authorities believed
the plane had landed, but the flight had lost contact with air controllers, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Tuesday in her morning briefing.
Teams found the dead 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 Lieutenant Luis Enrique Castillo. Castillo's family back in their rural town in southern Mexico were left scrambling for answers, hoping for the best for their missing son.
“We don't know what to do," his father Eduardo 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. American authorities are investigating the 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.
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 (62.5 meters), climbing back up before trying again or looking for another airport entirely, Guzzetti said.
Guzzetti said the reported radar track shows that the pilot was descending rapidly below 200 feet (61 meters), a full 2 miles (3 kilometers) away 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.”
The plane crashed in a bay near the base of the causeway connecting Galveston Island to the mainland. The popular beach destination is about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of Houston.
Sky Decker, a professional yacht captain who lives near the crash site, said he jumped in his boat to see if he could help. He picked up two police officers who guided him through the thick fog to the nearly submerged plane. Decker jumped into the water and found a badly injured woman trapped beneath chairs and other debris.
“She had maybe 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) of air gap to breathe in," he said. "And there was jet fuel in there mixed with the water, fumes real bad. She was really fighting for her life.”
He said he also pulled out a man seated in front of her who had already died.
Eduardo Castillo gathered with the rest of his family and friends Tuesday afternoon in their small community of El Pantano in the sweltering southern Mexican state of Veracruz.
The father, who worked long hours as a carpenter to give his son the opportunities he never had, was desperately refreshing his phone every few minutes, looking for any news of their missing son. Mexico's Marines, he noted, had provided few other details than a call saying their son was missing.
Framed pictures of Luis Enrique Castillo and his many diplomas coated a wall of their home. He and his wife were expecting a baby due in three months.
On Tuesday night, Castillo heard his phone ring and answered, hearing the words he had dreaded. His son was dead.
“Now he's never going to meet his unborn child,” Eduard Castillo said as his family hugged and sobbed around him.
A spokesperson for the NTSB said in an email 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.
The aircraft had a “very, very proven design,” said aviation safety expert John Cox. He said it’s the latest version of a series that has been in use since the 1960s and would have been outfitted with all the modern electronics, avionics and equipment.
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.
In a social media post, the foundation offered condolences to the families of the crash victims.
Shriners Children’s Texas said in a statement that it learned of the crash with “profound sadness” but wasn't able to provide any information about the child's condition.
This latest crash comes amid a year of intense scrutiny on aviation safety after a string of high-profile crashes and the flight disruptions during the government shutdown driven by the shortage of air traffic controllers.
The January midair collision between an Army helicopter and an airliner near Washington, D.C., was followed by the crash of a medical transport plane in Philadelphia. This fall’s fiery UPS plane crash only added to the concerns. Still, the total number of crashes in 2025 was actually down a bit from last year, and experts say flying remains safe overall.
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Marquez reported from El Pantano and Janetsky reported from Mexico City. Hallie Golden contributed to this report.
