Four people remained missing on June 20, 2025, after an Airmedic medical helicopter crashed in a wooded area north of Baie-Johan-Beetz near Natashquan on Quebec’s Côte-Nord.
CBC reported that five people were aboard the aircraft, including four Airmedic crew members dispatched on a rescue mission. One person had been found by the time of the report and was said to be alive and not in danger, though injured enough to require hospital treatment. The other four were still unaccounted for as search operations continued.
The helicopter had taken off on Friday morning to answer a call for help that had been received the day before. According to Airmedic spokesperson Raphaele Bourgault, the aircraft was responding to an emergency evacuation when it crashed Friday night around 10:30 p.m. in dense forest near the lake and was believed to have gone down in water.
The Search and Rescue response was substantial. The Sûreté du Québec and the Canadian Armed Forces were both deployed, with a command post established in Havre-Saint-Pierre. CBC reported that the military was sending an aircraft and an Air Force helicopter, while search-and-rescue technicians were also preparing to dive near the helicopter’s last known location.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada said it had been notified and opened an investigation. Its spokesperson said the helicopter had crashed in a lake shortly after takeoff while carrying out a medical evacuation. Quebec police said their investigators would cooperate with the federal probe.
The source material does not identify the missing people or offer an immediate explanation for why the aircraft went down. What it does show is the complexity of the operation: a rescue flight turned into a search for the rescuers, in terrain that emergency officials described as difficult to reach and in a region where aircraft support was needed to access the site.
Airmedic said the crash site lay in thick forest and remote country north of Natashquan. That remoteness mattered immediately, because both the search effort and any later recovery work depended on air access and specialized personnel. The report also noted that the aircraft type, a BK-117, is widely used in medical transport and rescue work, but its strength could not prevent the accident from becoming a major emergency.
By the time of the CBC report, the focus had shifted from the original rescue call to finding the missing crew members and understanding what caused the crash. With one survivor in hospital and four people still unaccounted for, the incident became one of the most serious aviation emergencies on Quebec’s North Shore that week.
The federal investigation and the joint search effort were continuing, while the public information available at the time remained limited to the known facts of the crash, the number on board and the scale of the response.
