Aircraft missing on flight to Tobago

Stephon Nicholas

An air­craft which left St Vin­cent and the Grenadines en route to To­ba­go on Fri­day has gone miss­ing.

The pri­vate plane re­port­ed­ly de­part­ed from Ar­gyle In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port bound for ANR Robin­son In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port. How­ev­er, Air Traf­fic Con­trol lost con­tact with the air­craft dur­ing the jour­ney, and it nev­er ar­rived in To­ba­go.

A source at Air Traf­fic Con­trol in Trinidad and To­ba­go con­firmed the sit­u­a­tion this morn­ing, say­ing Ar­gyle con­tact­ed Pi­ar­co about the mat­ter and au­thor­i­ties are “look­ing for the air­craft.”

He told Guardian Me­dia the air­craft was fly­ing low un­der vi­su­al flight rules (VFR), be­low 4,000 feet.

The air­craft’s jour­ney was tracked on the Fligh­tradar24 web­site, which showed it at 4,025 feet and trav­el­ling at ap­prox­i­mate­ly 142 knots. How­ev­er, all da­ta was sud­den­ly lost dur­ing the flight.

“This hap­pened some years ago around Sint Maarten. It was low-fly­ing as well. That air­craft had crashed,” the Air Traf­fic Con­trol source said.

How­ev­er, he said some air­craft de­lib­er­ate­ly switch off their transpon­ders.

Mean­while, me­dia in St Vin­cent told Guardian Me­dia that au­thor­i­ties there have re­mained tight-lipped about the mat­ter. The mod­el of the air­craft, the num­ber of peo­ple aboard and the reg­is­tra­tion num­ber re­main un­known.

This is a de­vel­op­ing sto­ry.