Veteran Bahamas pilot safely ditches charter plane off Florida coast

Veteran Bahamas pilot Ian Nixon turned a routine 20-minute charter hop into a fight for survival when his Beechcraft King Air 300 lost both engines, then its navigation, radios and avionics, forcing him to ditch in the Atlantic with 11 people aboard.

The emergency unfolded on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, after the twin-engine turboprop departed Marsh Harbour in the Bahamas bound for Freeport, Grand Bahama. Nixon, who said he has flown since age 18 and has more than 25 years in the cockpit, told CBS News that the aircraft first lost one engine and then the second. With no usable navigation, radio or avionics, he said he could not keep the plane in the air any longer and brought it down roughly 50 nautical miles off Florida’s east coast, near Melbourne and Vero Beach.

All 11 people on board survived, and three suffered minor injuries, according to rescue accounts. Nixon was treated for minor injuries at Holmes Regional Medical Center in Melbourne before returning to Nassau with transportation arranged by the Bahamian government.

The rescue was a joint operation by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Air Force Reserve’s 920th Rescue Wing. An emergency locator transmitter signal from the aircraft alerted Coast Guard watchstanders to a possible distress situation, and rescuers then used an HH-60W Jolly Green II helicopter and an HC-130J Combat King II aircraft to find the survivors and hoist them from a life raft. The Air Force Reserve Command said crews assisted in the rescue of 11 survivors from a downed civilian aircraft about 80 miles east of Melbourne.

For Nixon and the others, the hardest stretch came after the ditching, when they floated for hours before help arrived. Nixon said the group was unsure whether anyone was coming until an Air Force plane spotted them. The outcome, he said, reinforced a message shaped by the ordeal: keep faith, pray and tell family members you love them.

The landing also underscored how much depended on experience, preparation and quick coordination after the airplane lost its margins one by one. Nixon had no engine redundancy left, no working radios to call for help and no navigation suite to guide him to shore. In that narrow window, he chose to put the aircraft on the water in a way that kept all 11 people alive long enough for rescuers to reach them, a result the Air Force described as remarkable.