A medical transport plane carrying five people crashed into Lake Michigan, USA on Friday and one person was rescued, U.S. Coast Guard officials said. Petty Officer Nathaniel Parks said the plane went down Friday morning a few miles off the shore of Ludington, a resort town on Michigan's west coast. A passenger was rescued shortly about two hours later. The Cessna 206 left Alma, about 150 miles northwest of Detroit, Friday morning on its way to Rochester, Minnesota, said Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory. Parks said the crash was reported by a witness as well as a distress signal from the plane by satellite. A map of the plane's flight path from flightaware.com suggests problems developed about one-third of the way into the flight when the westbound plane doubled back over Lake Michigan and then had a steep decline in altitude near Ludington. The plane's owner, Carol Freed, told The Grand Rapids Press that people on board were taking one patient to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. Freed told the paper everyone on the plane was from the Alma area. Officials at Gratiot Medical Center in Alma were investigating, but could not confirm if the flight originated at the hospital, spokeswoman Amanda Huff said. A search for the other four people on board was under way, and no other details were immediately available. This is not the first time a medical flight has crashed in Lake Michigan. A Survival Flight plane carrying donor organs for a double lung transplant operation crashed in June 2007 into the lake near Milwaukee on its way to the University of Michigan Health System hospital in Ann Arbor. All six people on board the Cessna 550 Citation were killed.
