Pieces of a private plane that went down in a South Florida neighborhood on Sunday, killing all nine people aboard, were found miles from the crash site — indicating that the jet began breaking apart in flight, federal investigators said Tuesday.
At a news conference in West Palm Beach, National Transportation Safety Board member Tom Chapman said investigators recovered most of the Learjet 60’s left elevator — the part on the tail that controls whether the nose points up or down — in three pieces between 1.3 and 3.8 miles from the crash site on Monday.
Chapman did not specify where the pieces were found but said their distance from the crash site indicated the part had separated in flight.
“Finding that piece is a very, very significant bit of evidence,” Chapman said. “Knowing that it was lost is a very important piece of evidence in terms of pointing us towards other things to investigate.”
Still, he emphasized that the investigation remained in the early stages. Investigators have not determined whether the part’s separation contributed to the aircraft’s loss of control or resulted from forces acting on the plane, Chapman said.
“We don’t know yet, so it’s going to take some more analysis,” he said.
The business jet left Austin on Sunday around 10:37 a.m. for North Eleuthera Airport in the Bahamas. Shortly before the crash, a pilot reported rain, ice and moderate turbulence and then declared an emergency, according to archived radio communications. The plane crashed nose-first at the entrance of a mobile home park in Palm Beach County around 12:50 p.m., leaving a large crater in the roadway.
Federal investigators are examining whether weather played a role in the crash, which occurred as storms were scattered across the region.
On Monday, families of the seven passengers identified those killed in the crash, including Austin tech entrepreneur Adam Robinson; his wife, ceramicist Helen Sharp; and their children, Emma, 4, and Charlie, 2.
The other passengers were Rachael Reed, Charmi Fehr and Anita Maria Cetina, the families said. Cetina was Emma and Charlie’s nanny, and Reed and Fehr were a couple and friends of the family, Robinson’s father told the Austin American-Statesman.
The pilot was identified as Jeff Gregory by his former employer, East Coast Jets, a Pennsylvania-based private jet charter company. The company told The Washington Post that he worked there in 2016 and 2017. Gregory, 55, was from Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania, Fox 29 Philadelphia reported.
Nathalia Filgueiras, 20, of Boca Raton, Florida, was identified as the co-pilot by her mother in an interview with the New York Times.
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