The Briefing:
- All five people aboard the plane died: pilot Mehmet Cankaya, 43, and health workers Perla Costanza Álvarez, Sandy García, María Guzmán and Yuliza Figueredo, Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella confirmed on the night of Wednesday, September 16.
- The Cessna T206, tail number HK-4985, went down around 9,000 feet inside Tatamá National Natural Park, a mountain range straddling the Chocó, Risaralda and Valle del Cauca departments.
- On Thursday, September 17, relatives disclosed the last messages the crew managed to send home minutes before losing contact — just after wrapping a mission that had treated roughly 600 earthquake-affected residents in Condoto.
A goodbye no one recognized as one
Nobody on board knew those would be their final words. Before boarding the Cessna at Condoto's Mandinga airfield, nurse Sandy García sent her mother a photo with a short caption: "on my way." Minutes after takeoff she recorded two more clips — one of the runway shrinking behind the plane, another of the Chocó jungle spreading out below — according to a relative who spoke to Noticias Caracol. Friends say documenting each medical trip had become second nature to her.
Pilot Mehmet Cankaya had his own unwitting farewell. Just before 9:23 a.m., he sent his wife, Adriana Revelo, a picture of a stray dog the couple had talked about adopting. She wrote back with a heart and a reply that turned out to be their last exchange: "Happy trip back." Seconds later, the aircraft dropped off radar.
A slope too steep for any helicopter
The moment contact broke off, the plane's emergency beacon fired automatically and Colombia's Air and Space Force took over the search through its National Personnel Recovery Center. Around 7:30 a.m. Monday, a UH-60 Black Hawk crew spotted wreckage on a slope near the hamlet of Oscordó, in Pueblo Rico, inside the boundaries of Tatamá park, as Cambio Colombia reported hours after the sighting.
Spotting the wreckage proved far easier than reaching it. Local reports put some of the slopes at roughly 60 degrees, terrain so steep that no aircraft could set down so much as a single wheel. Brigadier General Luis Díaz, commander of Air Combat Command 5, had to lower a first team on a rescue cable instead: "the aircraft can't land, it can't even set a wheel down," he told Caracol Radio, according to Infobae. That first crew reached the fuselage but found no one inside. The plane hadn't exploded — it broke apart on impact, its wreckage scattered across more than one spot on the mountainside, according to 724 Noticias. Not until the fourth day of the operation, Wednesday, September 16, did a second team inserted by air locate the bodies of all five crew members.
Who the five victims were
The four passengers were part of a joint outreach run by the Colombian Civil Air Patrol, insurer Colmédica and the Clínica del Country, which spent September 11 through 13 bringing checkups and consultations to families in Condoto still recovering from August's earthquake; the final tally landed near 600 patients treated. Cankaya ran the travel agency Mega Travel and had spent years pairing that work with humanitarian flights to remote towns as a volunteer for the same civil air patrol. He and Revelo had been married ten years and had three daughters; the couple had bought the plane roughly three years earlier, partly so they could fly together as a family.
Why this route still matters so much
A month earlier, on August 10, a magnitude-7.4 quake centered in San José del Palmar shook western Colombia; the most recent tally cited by Telemedellín puts the toll at 331 dead and another 400,000 people affected. Large stretches of that terrain still have no road access, which is exactly why flights like the one Cankaya and his four passengers completed remain, for many Chocó families, the only realistic way to reach medical care. The HK-4985 crash also adds to a grim tally for Colombian aviation this year, which already included the fatal crash that killed singer Yeison Jiménez, an incident involving state carrier Satena and an episode with a military Hercules aircraft, according to Vanguardia, renewing scrutiny of flight protocols over the western Andes.
What investigators do next
It now falls to Colombia's civil aviation accident investigation unit to determine whether weather, altitude or a mechanical failure caused the crash — a process that, in comparable cases, has stretched on for months. In the meantime, the Civil Air Patrol and Colmédica bid farewell to the five in a joint statement, praising the generosity behind putting their training in service of the people who needed it most.
