Investigators weigh whether elevator loss caused nosedive or aircraft forces caused elevator separation
On Tuesday, National Transportation Safety Board member Tom Chapman said investigators had found “the majority” of the Learjet 60’s left elevator in three pieces. The elevator is a control surface on the tail that controls upward and downward movement of the nose. Pieces were found between 1.3 miles (2 km) and 3.8 miles from the Palm Beach, Florida, crash site, and that distance led investigators to determine the elevator had separated before impact.
Chapman said the loss of the elevator was important evidence. “Knowing that it was lost is a very important piece of evidence in terms of pointing us towards other things to investigate,” he said.
The NTSB had determined that the elevator separated before impact. It had not established whether losing the elevator caused the Learjet to nosedive or whether “forces on the aircraft caused that to separate,” Chapman said. He also said the control surface may not have been “effective” at the speed the plane was travelling.
The Learjet 60 was bound for the Bahamas from Austin, Texas, when it nosedived into a multi-lane highway in Palm Beach and exploded on impact Sunday. All nine people aboard died.
In air traffic control audio recordings, someone in the cockpit reported “moderate turbulence” and said the crew was “managing the ice.” The same voice then said the plane was “picking up precipitation” and “we need to climb.” Moments later, the voice reported the plane descending at 10,000ft (3,048m) per minute.
An emergency was declared, and the pilots could be heard yelling “we are in an overspeed condition descending 20,000ft per minute” before saying, “we are going to crash into the ground.”
The NTSB plans to investigate the role weather played in the crash. Officials struggled to access the wreckage because the jet’s impact created a huge crater on a Palm Beach road, and Chapman said the force of the impact severely damaged the wreckage.
A joint statement named seven passengers who died: tech entrepreneur Adam Robinson; his wife, Helen Sharp; their children, Emma, four, and Charlie, two; friends of the family Rachael Reed and Charmi Fehr; and Anita Maria Cetina, a nanny.
Media reports identified 55-year-old Jeffrey Gregory as the pilot and Nathalia Filgueiras, 20, as the co-pilot. Filgueiras was reported to have earned her pilot’s licence when she was 17.
Three years before the crash, the young co-pilot spoke about earning her pilot licence, according to an embedded BBC video.