Contact with N316AF ended on a Thursday afternoon, over the mountains west of Jérémie, Haiti. Agape Flights, the Venice-based nonprofit that owned the plane, searched through the night and into the next morning. When crews reached the wreckage on February 6, the company confirmed what the silence already suggested: no one on board had survived.
The aircraft was a 1980 Embraer 110 Bandeirante, a twin-engine turboprop built to carry about 3,000 pounds of cargo. It had been hauling freight with two pilots, part of a humanitarian run over terrain that climbs to nearly 7,000 feet, a stretch of western Haiti known for turbulence.
Chief executive Allen Speer delivered the news in a video posted to social media. “Our hearts are broken. We grieve deeply for the families of the pilots who are now enduring an unimaginable loss.”
The two pilots
On February 12, Agape named the two men: Patrick Decker and Kory Elleby. Decker had moved to Florida 10 years earlier and joined Agape the next year as a volunteer pilot, after more than 40 years flying for United Airlines. In his final stretch there, he captained a flight with his own son beside him as first officer. “Sharing the cockpit was more than a professional milestone, it was a deeply meaningful gift he treasured”, the organization said.
Decker also spent 50 years as a firefighter and, in 1996, served as fire chief of Sparta, New Jersey. He was married 40 years to his wife, Kathy, and the couple raised two grown children.
Elleby flew with Agape for eight years, having moved to Venice with his wife, Ruthie, in 2016. He learned to fly before he learned to drive. The couple built Sunshine Electrical Services into a respected business around Venice. “He often said that flying with Agape Flights was not merely a role, but a calling he deeply cherished”, the organization said.
The faith-based group has worked this same route since November 1980, when it began with a single Cessna from Sarasota to Haiti carrying emergency supplies and mail to two dozen missionary families. It now runs from Venice Municipal Airport and serves roughly 300 missionary families across the Caribbean.
Loss in Haiti is not new to the organization. Four years earlier, rioters stormed an airport in Les Cayes and set an Agape plane ablaze; the crew got out safely, and donations paid for a replacement. Two years after that, a Cessna flown by Agape landed in Haiti with its gear still up, and no one was hurt.
Weather around the disappearance was poor. A cold front was moving through the Caribbean, and satellite imagery showed a storm system building over eastern Cuba, its energy pressing through western Haiti near Jérémie, close to where the plane was found. Dan Diggins, a retired commercial pilot who once investigated air safety for the FAA, called the aircraft’s Pratt & Whitney engines among the most reliable in the world. The cause of the crash has not been stated.
Sources
- Agape Flights plane crash in Haiti leaves no survivors
- Agape Flights pilots killed in Haiti plane crash identified: ‘Our hearts are heavy’ | FOX 13 Tampa Bay
