A flight instructor and her student are presumed dead after their plane went down over a lake in Louisiana.
Taylor Dickey, 30, and an unnamed adult student took off from Gulfport-Biloxi International Airport on Monday, Nov. 24, per WWL 4, WBRZ 2 and the Daily Mail.
The single-engine aircraft disappeared about an hour later while flying over Lake Pontchartrain, according to the Coast Guard, per WWL 4 and the Daily Mail.
PEOPLE reached out to the Coast Guard for comment on Sunday, Nov. 30, but did not receive an immediate response.
Wreckage from the missing plane has been located using "specialized sonar, dive operations and K9 search," per a Nov. 30 Facebook update from the United Cajun Navy, a local nonprofit assisting with the search efforts.
In a press conference held on Nov. 25, Michael Carastro, the owner of the flight school that owned the downed plane, stated that both passengers are "presumed dead."
"Nobody knows what happened at this point. The initial -- the preliminary data -- indicates that it was not mechanical, so we are going to wait on the official agencies that are investigating the operation. I'm not gonna make any suppositions on how it happened," he continued.
PEOPLE reached out to the Federal Aviation Administration and the New Orleans Police Department for comment on Sunday, Nov. 30, but did not receive an immediate response.
Carastro added, "The instructor was highly qualified. She had been coming up on about 12 or 13 hundred hours [of flying], which makes her about 200 hours short of meeting her requirements for the airlines, which was her ultimate goal. The other [student] had the same aspirations]."
Carastro also said there was no distress call from the plane at the time of the crash.
"It was an unbelievable tragedy," he added. "I've been instructing for 46 years. I've never -- never -- had this. It's my first. So it's hitting me pretty hard, as well as the rest of the employees here at Apollo and Million Air because both individuals were very well-liked. And so we're devastated."
Carastro, who shared that Dickey’s father is also a pilot, said that her family is currently “in shock.”
A Change.org petition has since been created requesting that the Gulfport-Biloxi Airport Authority consider the addition of “Taylor Dickey Field” to the official name of the airport.
“Through her instructional role and her community advocacy, Taylor became a well-known figure at the airport and among flight training stakeholders in the Gulf Coast region. Her loss has deeply affected students, colleagues, airfield personnel and aviation partners,” the petition states.
“Designating the airfield as ‘Taylor Dickey Field’ would stand as a lasting testament to her contributions and her embodiment of the spirit of aviation,” it continues.