National Transportation Safety Board says discovery of parts confirms plane was breaking apart before it crashed
A piece of the private Learjet 60 that crashed in Florida, killing all nine people onboard, was found 4 miles (6km) away from the crash site, according to investigators on Tuesday, providing confirmation the plane was breaking apart prior to impact.
The majority of the left elevator, part of the tail that controls the pitch of the aircraft, was found in three separate pieces between 1.3 miles and 3.8 miles from the crash site at Greenacres, near West Palm Beach, according to National Transportation Safety Board member Tom Chapman.
“What that means exactly, in terms of what caused the aircraft to lose control, or whether the loss of this piece was a result of the forces on the aircraft, we don’t know yet,” Chapman said at a news conference.
Chapman said without the elevator intact, the pilot would not have been able to pull the aircraft out of its nosedive.
“At those speeds I don’t know that it would’ve been effective even if it had still been attached to the aircraft, but knowing that it was lost is a very important piece of evidence in terms of pointing us toward other things to investigate,” Chapman added.
The jet was flying from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas on Sunday when it appears to have flown into a thunderstorm at 35,000ft, causing – according to radio transmissions from co-pilot Nathalia Filgueiras – icing on the jet and turbulence, causing it to climb and fall by more than 700ft before it began to dive.
Filgueiras reportedly texted her boyfriend before the situation turned critical: “I’ve got turbulence, I’ve got ice.”
She also told air traffic controllers that the plane was descending at 8,000ft per minute, then 10,000ft per minute. During one of her final transmissions she said: “Declare an emergency 722 Bravo Delta, we are in an overspeed condition descending 20,000ft per minute.”
Seconds later, it crashed in to the ground near a trailer park and exploded into a fireball at the intersection of Military Trail and Cresthaven Boulevard in Palm Beach.
Chapman said weather would be a key initial focus of the investigation into the crash.
The victims of the crash have been identified by relatives as technology entrepreneur Adam Robinson; his wife, Helen Sharp; and their two young children. Family friends Rachael Reed and Charmi Fehr also died in the crash, as did the family’s nanny, Anita Maria Cetina.
The pilot of the plane has been identified as 55-year-old Jeff Gregory by his employer, East Coast Jets, a charter aviation company based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “Our prayers go out to Jeff’s family, his fellow crew member, the passengers and everyone affected by this heart breaking tragedy,” the company said in a statement.
In the NTSB briefing on Tuesday, Chapman encouraged anyone living in the area to leave any pieces that may look as if they belong to the aircraft alone and to contact the NTSB or local authorities.
He said the NTSB would work to lay out the recovered pieces of the plane in a way that “remakes” the aircraft in order to determine what may have occurred.
Aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti told the Associated Press that the pieces that broke off the aircraft were probably a result of the nosedive, not the cause, claiming the pieces found close to the crash site indicate they likely fell off closer to the ground.
“If those parts would have broken off at altitude, those pieces would be a lot farther away,” Guzzetti said.
Freeze frames from videos appear to show the entire horizontal stabilizer missing from the Learjet’s tail prior to impact.
Former NTSB member John Goglia said flight tracking data appears to show the aircraft leveling off for about eight seconds at about 8,000ft (2,438 meters) prior to its nosedive to the ground. He said he believes the key tail pieces likely came off when the captain of the plane attempted to pull up sharply.
“He apparently leveled off for brief moments at 8,000ft and to accomplish that he likely overstressed the tail and the horizontal stabilizer separated from the airplane,” Goglia said.
A preliminary report describing what happened will be released in about a month, but it will likely take more than a year to determine the exact cause of the crash.
