Rescuers pulled 11 survivors from the Atlantic Ocean after their plane went down off Florida’s coast, and the pilot’s quick thinking in those final moments made sure everyone made it out alive. The small Beechcraft twin-propeller aircraft ditched about 80 miles east of Melbourne, Florida, leaving passengers and crew stranded in choppy waters for nearly five hours before the U.S. Air Force arrived.
What happened next, from the pilot’s desperate attempts to keep the plane in the air to the military crew’s last-minute fuel dash, turned what could have been a tragedy into what rescuers called a “pretty miraculous” survival story. The survivors, all adults from the Bahamas, had crammed into the plane’s single life raft by the time the rescue team reached them. There was no sign of the aircraft or any wreckage, and the passengers had no idea help was coming.
