The Coast Guard announced Tuesday night that it has suspended its search for passengers who were on board a small plane that crashed off the coast of North Carolina over the weekend. Four teenagers and four adults returning from a hunting trip were on board the plane, authorities said earlier Tuesday.
One body has been pulled from the Atlantic Ocean by search crews combing the area, and there is no indication that anyone survived the crash, Carteret County Sheriff Asa Buck said Monday. The Coast Guard said Tuesday night that authorities had searched more than 2,000 square miles over 48 hours.
Everyone on board the plane was from North Carolina, and most lived in Carteret, a coastal county of nearly 70,000 people that includes the southern edge of the Outer Banks.
The sheriff’s office identified the members of the group as Ernest Durwood Rawls, 67 and the pilot; Jeffrey Worthington Rawls, 28; Stephanie Ann McInnis Fulcher, 42; Jonathan Kole McInnis, 15; Douglas Hunter Parks, 45; Noah Lee Styron, 15; Michael Daily Shepard, 15; and Jacob Nolan Taylor, 16.
Carteret County includes communities such as Emerald Isle and Atlantic Beach as well as the Cape Lookout National Seashore and its iconic Outer Banks lighthouse, which has a black-and-white diamond pattern.
“We are incredibly saddened and join with the Down East and Eastern North Carolina community as we await official word on the airplane crash,” Carteret County Public Schools said in a statement early Monday afternoon. “Crisis teams are on school campuses to support students, staff and families.”
Search crews were still looking for the main body of the plane on Monday. Authorities had identified three debris fields, which had been moving farther off shore into the Atlantic Ocean.
“We’ve got an all-hands-on-deck event going on here,” Baer said. “And we want the citizens of Carteret County and eastern North Carolina to know that your Coast Guard is out there doing our absolute best alongside our partners.”
The Coast Guard said in a news release that it received a report of a possible downed aircraft on Sunday about 4 miles east of Drum Inlet from a Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point air traffic controller. The air traffic controller reported that the aircraft was behaving erratically on radar, then disappeared from the screen.
The single-engine Pilatus PC-12/47 crashed into the water approximately 18 miles northeast of Michael J. Smith Field in Beaufort, North Carolina, about 2 p.m. Sunday, according to an email from the Federal Aviation Administration. A preliminary accident notification on the FAA’s website noted that the aircraft “crashed into water under unknown circumstances.”
FlightAware listed a departure for that plane from Hyde County Airport at 1:35 p.m. Sunday and noted it was last seen near Beaufort at 2:01 p.m.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash.
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