Crucial evidence found could help unlock Florida jet crash mystery

A piece of the Learjet that slammed into the ground in Florida, killing all nine people aboard, was found nearly six kilometres from the crash site, investigators say, confirming the plane started breaking apart before impact.

National Transportation Safety Board member Tom Chapman said most of the left elevator — part of the tail that controls the plane’s pitch — was found in three pieces between two kilometres and 6.1 kilometres from Greenacres, near West Palm Beach, where the jet went down on Sunday afternoon.

“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.

Without the elevator intact, the pilot would not have been able to pull the Learjet out of its nosedive, Chapman said.

“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 towards other things to investigate,” Chapman said.

The pieces that broke off the plane were probably a byproduct of the nosedive, not the cause, aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti told The Associated Press.

Their discovery within a few kilometres of the crash site suggested the elevator components had fallen off closer to the ground, he said.

“If those parts would have broken off at altitude, those pieces would be a lot farther away,” Guzzetti said.

Friends and family mourn the pilot

The plane had taken off from Austin, Texas, and the victims included technology entrepreneur Adam Robinson, his wife, Helen Sharp, and their two young children, relatives said.

Jeff Gregory, 55, who lived in the Philadelphia suburbs, was one of two crew members in the cockpit of the Bahamas-bound Learjet 60.

As the plane plunged, a man’s voice could be heard reciting the Lord’s Prayer in the background of the co-pilot’s final radio transmissions to air traffic control. Friends are convinced it was Gregory, a longtime aviator, husband, father and devout Christian.

Thomas Noetzel, the director of operations at the company that operated the flight, Upper Jets, organised an online fundraiser to support Gregory’s wife and children.

Gregory was a close, personal friend and “knowing him has made me a better person”, Noetzel wrote on the fundraising website, GoFundMe.

Noetzel’s father, Walter, posted on Facebook: “Jeff was a devoted, conscientious, and deeply faithful man who had a genuine passion for flying and a strong love for the Lord.”

The Learjet hit the ground with enough force to create a crater before bursting into flames. About 600 residents remain displaced, but only one person on the ground was reported injured.

Co-pilot radios and texts about ice and turbulence

Investigators have been scouring the area for wreckage, collecting dashcam video and speaking to witnesses. After days of heavy rain, they plan to access the crater on Wednesday and expect to find critical components of the plane.

Chapman reasserted on Tuesday that weather was a focus of the investigation.

Thiago Corteleti, the stepfather of co-pilot Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras, told the New York Post that she had texted her boyfriend about 10 minutes before the crash, telling him: “I’ve got turbulence, I’ve got ice.”

In the last two minutes of the flight, Filgueiras shifted from calmly communicating with air traffic controllers to calling out terrifying updates as the plane plummeted.

She told them ice was accumulating on the plane and that turbulence had thrown it up and down by more than 700 feet (210 metres).

“We’re going to crash into the ground,” she said, as the jet descended at a rate of more than 20,000 feet (6100 metres) per minute. And then, before the transmission cuts off: “We’re out of time!”

A preliminary NTSB report will be released in about a month, but it will likely take more than a year to determine the probable cause of the crash.

AP

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