One of the crew members on board the private jet that crashed in Florida yesterday (1 November) sent a message to her boyfriend just minutes before the plane went down.
20-year-old Nathalia Filgueiras, the plane’s co-pilot, is currently the only one of the nine crash victims who has been identified, with there being two crew members and seven passengers on board.
Her stepfather told the New York Post that just a few minutes before the crash she was texting her boyfriend about the conditions the flight was experiencing.
“She texted her boyfriend, I think, at 12:40 pm and the accident was at 12:50 pm,” Thiago Corteleti said of the last message she sent out before the crash.
“She just said, ‘I’ve got turbulence, I’ve got ice.”
Officials have told anyone who finds debris of the plane to report it and not to touch it themselves (Saul Martinez/Getty Images)
The private plane, a Learjet 60, crashed yesterday at around 12:50pm local time near West Palm Beach, with witnesses saying it was ‘like a missile going down’.
Investigators have said they are looking into possible causes of the crash but could confirm nothing at this moment.
NTSB Member Tom Chapman said that ice and turbulence was ‘certainly a factor’ they were looking at, explaining that three minutes before the crash the aircraft had reported manageable light ice and some turbulence.
Audio recordings of the plane’s crew speaking with air traffic control had someone on board warn that the aircraft was in ‘overspeed condition’ and heading towards the ground.
Just moments before the audio cut out a woman’s voice was heard shouting ‘look outside, we’re out of time!’ and then the plane impacted with the ground, exploding into a fireball which took the lives of all nine on board.
The plane lost altitude at an alarmingly rapid pace (LADbible/FlightRadar/Saul Martinez/Getty Images)
Officials have said that they now face the challenge of recovering evidence from the crash site, and they are hoping to find a cockpit voice recorder which could help shed further light on exactly what the pilots were discussing.
They do not yet have a probable cause of the crash and don’t intend to speculate, but they want to know what happened and avoid it happening again.
Chapman said that air traffic control received a request from the plane saying ‘we are picking up precipitation requesting to climb to 37,000 feet if able’, but 30 seconds later they were issued with a Mayday call with crew saying they were descending rapidly.
Justin Crabbe, commercial pilot CEO at Jettly, told LADbible that ice on the wings of a plane ‘an significantly affect how an aircraft flies and how turbulence can also impact an aircraft’.
He explained that it ‘changes the shape of the wings, reduces lift, increases drag and can make the aircraft much more difficult to control’, and could possibly have made a turbulent situation worse.
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