‘It has been catastrophic’, remarked on the scene the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. ‘It looked like the fall of a missile’, he said.
Several videos circulating on social media and picked up by American media show a craft plunging downward in a dizzying drop and slamming into the ground at high speed, enveloped in a massive fireball beside a busy road.
Describing it as a “terrible tragedy,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on X that all nine people on board had died.
The aircraft had taken off from Austin, Texas, and was en route to the Bahamas when it crashed at 12:50 local time in Palm Beach County, about ten miles from Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s luxurious residence.
The president had left the scene earlier in the morning. At the time of the crash, he was on his way to Iowa and Kansas for two campaign rallies ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections.
The aircraft was a Learjet 60, a business jet. It crashed in the Cresthaven neighborhood, near a mobile-home park whose roughly 600 residents were evacuated and sheltered by authorities.
The accident, by all accounts, did not produce any ground casualties, according to Governor DeSantis.
Chilling Final Exchanges
The American aviation regulator (FAA) announced the opening of a joint investigation with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to determine the causes of the tragedy.
Storms had been reported in the area. Donald Trump was holding an umbrella when he boarded Air Force One about an hour earlier on the Palm Beach airport tarmac, which had recently been renamed in his honor.
The last exchanges between the Learjet crew and the control tower are described as literally chilling and offer a glimpse into how quickly the accident unfolded, according to a live audio recording of under two minutes released on liveatc.net.
A female voice in the cockpit is heard reporting “moderate turbulence” to air traffic control and saying that the crew is “dealing with icing.”
The same person soon says the aircraft has entered “a weather area” and must “climb,” then alarmingly adds: “Mayday, Mayday, we are descending at 10,000 feet per minute.”
‘Emergency, we are overspeed’, she exclaims, indicating that the plane is now dropping at ‘20,000 feet per minute’. ‘Altitude is at your discretion, tell me what you need’, responds the controller in a neutral voice.
‘We are going to crash to the ground’, replies the other crew member, just before the final scream and the cutting of communications.
Weather Conditions Will Be a Major Element of the Investigation
Weather conditions will be a major element of the investigation into the causes of the business aircraft crash that occurred Sunday in Florida, a senior official of the U.S. Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said on Monday.
At a press briefing in West Palm Beach, Tom Chapman, a member of the NTSB’s board, retraced the Learjet 60’s final hours, a Bombardier model produced up to 2007, which had taken off from Austin, Texas at 10:37 a.m. (15:37 GMT) bound for North Eleuthera Airport in the Bahamas.
Authorities had not yet confirmed the identities of the victims, pending genetic analyses.
Several relatives of the co-pilot identified her to multiple American media outlets as Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras, aged 20, from Boca Raton, Florida.
According to them, she had earned her pilot’s license at 17 before obtaining a driver’s license and had around 1,300 flight hours. She had started working for a Fort Lauderdale-based aircraft rental company about nine months earlier.
Investigators have not yet determined who was at the controls at the moment of the crash.
According to Tom Chapman, the aircraft had been equipped after delivery with a cockpit voice recorder (CVR), but it remains unclear whether it was still on the aircraft.
Tim Monville, the lead investigator in charge of this crash, said that a motorist had been injured in the leg when the plane nosedived into a busy road, leaving a deep crater.
According to the NTSB, the plane had been chartered by Aurora Aviation for a flight operated by Upper Jets. Requests for comment from these companies were not immediately answered by AFP.
The rental company Jettly, which had also listed this Learjet with registration N722BD in its catalog, said that the aircraft went into service in 2004 and underwent a refurbishment in 2018.
The aircraft’s owner, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) registry, was a Delaware-registered company named LR60271 LLC.
