On Monday, April 13, 2026, Guyana’s Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) officially confirmed the death of a Nicaraguan pilot whose small commercial aircraft vanished three days prior in the country’s unforgiving interior landscape. The pilot has been identified as Captain Ryder Castillo, a former serviceman in Nicaragua’s military, who was at the controls of a Cessna 208 owned by local carrier Air Services Limited (ASL).
The plane, registered under the call sign 8R-YAC, lost all contact with air traffic control during a routine domestic shuttle flight between the towns of Mahdia and Imabaimadai on the morning of Friday, April 10. Search and rescue teams were able to locate the wrecked aircraft from the air within hours of it going missing, but the remote location of the crash — nestled in steep, jungle-covered mountains — made an immediate on-site recovery impossible. Aerial access to the crash zone was deemed too high-risk for rescue crews, prompting command to deploy a team of Guyana Defence Force (GDF) Special Forces, who landed their helicopter at a more accessible clearing miles away and hiked over multiple days to reach the site.
Upon arriving at the wreckage, the Special Forces team recovered Captain Castillo’s remains, and is now arranging logistics to move the body out of the remote backcountry to a population center for official processing. In the wake of the tragedy, Guyana’s Aviation Minister Deodat Indar has already appointed a dedicated accident investigator to lead a full inquiry into what caused the crash.
This incident comes amid a period of heightened engagement between GCAA leadership and domestic aviation operators. Just days before the crash, GCAA’s Director-General, Retired Lt. Col., held a meeting with active pilots operating in Guyana, though it remains unclear if representatives from all domestic carriers including ASL were in attendance. ASL, the operator of the crashed Cessna, had only recently received regulatory approval to restart flights to the community of Matthews Ridge, with the approval restricted exclusively to the airline’s most experienced pilots. The company is already cooperating with an ongoing GCAA probe into a separate incident involving another of its aircraft, and has confirmed it will share all relevant data and internal records with investigators working on this latest crash.