NTSB says tail pieces show Florida Learjet broke apart before impact

Weather remains a key focus as the inquiry continues

National Transportation Safety Board investigators said they had found pieces from the Learjet’s horizontal tail more than a mile from where the aircraft made impact. The crash killed all nine people aboard and left a fiery crater in the ground. A photograph credited to Rebecca Blackwell/AP showed investigators working at the crash scene in Greenacres, Florida, on 2 November.

At the Tuesday news conference, NTSB member Tom Chapman said the horizontal tail had broken into three pieces. He said the discovery confirmed the plane was breaking apart before it hit the ground. Chapman said the aircraft could not have pulled up from its nose dive without the tail intact, and he was unsure it could have recovered even with the tail intact because of the extreme rate of descent.

At the same briefing, Chapman asked anyone living near the crash site to leave any pieces that might appear to belong to the aircraft alone and to contact the NTSB or local authorities. He said the agency 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.

The Guardian reported that the jet was flying from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas on Sunday when it appears to have flown into a thunderstorm at 35,000 feet. According to radio transmissions from co-pilot Nathalia Filgueiras, the jet encountered icing and turbulence, which The Guardian said caused it to climb and fall by more than 700 feet before it began to dive.

Before the situation became critical, Filgueiras reportedly texted her boyfriend: “I’ve got turbulence, I’ve got ice.”

Filgueiras, 20, told air traffic controllers the Learjet was descending at 8,000 feet per minute, then 10,000 feet 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, the jet crashed into the ground near a trailer park and exploded into a fireball at the intersection of Military Trail and Cresthaven Boulevard in Palm Beach. All nine people aboard died.

Relatives identified technology entrepreneur Adam Robinson, his wife, Helen Sharp, and their two young children as victims of the crash. Family friends Rachael Reed and Charmi Fehr also died, as did the family’s nanny, Anita Maria Cetina.

East Coast Jets, a charter aviation company based in Allentown, Pennsylvania, identified the pilot as 55-year-old Jeff Gregory. The company said: “Our prayers go out to Jeff’s family, his fellow crew member, the passengers and everyone affected by this heart breaking tragedy.”

Chapman said on Monday that weather would be a key focus of the investigation. The NTSB said a preliminary report describing what happened would be released in about a month, but the exact cause was likely to take more than a year to determine.