Among the nine people aboard a private jet that crashed to the ground Sunday afternoon in Florida were a 20-year-old co-pilot and a Texas family including two young children.
All passengers on the Bahamas-bound flight, which also carried a nanny for the children and two other family friends, died when the Learjet 60 crashed into a residential area in Palm Beach County, Florida, leaving a smoking crater and wreckage in the street.
The pilot was Jeff Gregory, an aviator with years of experience, according to April Honnen, his former employer. His co-driver was Nathalia Filgueiras.
Ms. Filgueiras, of Boca Raton, Fla., had flown more than 1,300 hours and earned her pilot’s license at age 17, according to her mother, Camila Corteleti. She said her daughter had worked for Upper Jets, a private charter company based in Fort Lauderdale, and was a co-pilot on Sunday’s flight.
Ms Corteleti said her daughter had a passion for flying since childhood, a love forged while soaring the skies with her father, who is a recreational pilot. She remembers that her daughter, as a child, loved going to the Boca Raton airport to watch planes take off and land, and that she announced around age 12 that she wanted to become a pilot.
“She loved freedom,” Ms. Corteleti said. “It was completely different to see the world from above.”
According to a joint statement Monday from the families of those on board, the plane’s passengers included Adam Robinson, Helen Sharp and their two children, Emma and Charlie. The family lived in Austin, in a neighborhood of bungalows and live oaks west of downtown. Mr. Robinson has been the founder and CEO of several technology companies. Ms Sharp worked in public relations and had recently opened a ceramics studio.
“They were exceptional people,” said Kevin Sims, who sold the family a house in 2019 and saw them trick-or-treating on Halloween. “They were young, dynamic, kind, generous, warm. »
With them on the plane were Anita Maria Cetina, a nanny who “cared for Emma and Charlie with tenderness and dedication,” the family’s statement said, and another couple, Rachael Reed and Charmi Fehr, who were “full of joy and adventure.”
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the accident, with assistance from the Federal Aviation Administration.
Upper Jets, the private charter company, is cooperating with authorities “to ensure an objective understanding of what happened,” Thomas Noetzel, chief operating officer, said in a statement Monday.
“We are committed to supporting the families of all those who lost a loved one yesterday and we pray for them as we mourn together,” he added.
NTSB member Thomas B. Chapman told reporters at a news conference Monday afternoon in Florida that investigators had not yet recovered a cockpit voice recorder and could not yet say whether there was one on the plane.
The agency has just begun documenting the accident scene, which will take several days, said Timothy W. Monville, the committee’s investigator. “The biggest obstacle we’re going to face will be recovering the major wreckage from the impacted crater on the roadway,” he said.
Moments before the plane crashed, Ms. Filgueiras radioed air traffic controllers. She said the plane encountered rain and “manageable light and clear ice and moderate turbulence,” according to archived communications with Miami air traffic controllers.
She asked if the plane could climb to 37,000 feet, but, shortly after, she desperately declared Mayday, a life-threatening emergency. Ms. Filgueiras shouted over the radio that the plane was descending at a speed of 20,000 feet per minute. “We’re going to crash to the ground,” she said.
Robert Joslin, an aviation expert and associate professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, said in an interview that a two-person cockpit typically has a pilot in command and a pilot monitoring, or PF and PM — positions commonly described as pilot and co-pilot.
It’s not uncommon for young aviators to serve as instructor pilots on small planes, he said, so they can log their flight hours and move on to larger planes.
Since Ms. Filgueiras handled radio communications, she was almost certainly the pilot keeping watch, Dr. Joslin said. His job likely involved not only communications, but also close monitoring of the cockpit’s many instruments and gauges, while the pilot in command would have had more physical control over the aircraft.
Jared Isaacman, the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, wrote on social media Monday that it was too early to speculate about what might have gone wrong.
Mr. Isaacman said Ms. Filgueiras was “doing her job, communicating with ATC all the way in a terrifying situation.”
“She probably knew before many of these calls that she was going to die,” he said.
Karoun Demirjian, Madeleine Rubin And Jesus Jiménez reports contributed. Georgia Gee contributed to the research.
Gn headline
