(CBS/AP) A critically ill patient could become the seventh fatality of a plane crash that killed six members of an organ transplant team en route to save his life.

The patient, who was on the operating table when the plane went down in Lake Michigan on Monday, is back on the waiting list for another organ.

Divers resumed their search Wednesday in water as much as 50 feet deep, mapping the wreckage and bringing up debris for examination by National Transportation Safety Board investigators. The donor organ, which was packed in ice in a cooler, has not been found.

Hospital officials and organ-donation authorities would not identify the transplant patient other than to say he was a man, and would not say what type of organ he was awaiting, citing medical privacy rules.

But one of the doctors killed was a cardiac surgeon, suggesting the patient was about to get a new heart or lungs.

"It was a very sad moment in the operating room" when word came that the plane had gone down on its way from Milwaukee, said Dr. Jeffrey Punch, chief of transplant surgery at the University of Michigan Health System hospital in Ann Arbor.

The Cessna 550 Citation crashed about 5 p.m., shortly after takeoff. National Transportation Safety Board investigator John Brannen said the pilot had signaled an emergency and was making a left turn and heading back to the Milwaukee airport when the plane went down in 57-degree water.

The crash is under investigation.

Both pilots, two University of Michigan surgeons, and two technicians whose job was to prepare the organ for transplant, were killed.

Hospital officials would not disclose how far along the surgery was, but said that typically they do not remove a transplant recipient's old organ until they have a replacement ready.

Hearts can last outside the body for only four to six hours and lungs eight hours, said Dr. Tony D'Alessandro, executive director of the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinic Organ Procurement Organization.

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