Jeff Guzzetti, a former air safety investigator, had never heard or seen anything quite like it.
Just hours after a Learjet crash killed nine people in South Florida last week, the internet was awash in details that once might’ve taken weeks or months to uncover — or never been known at all.
There was audio of the young, female co-pilot talking to air traffic control, her voice shifting from calm to trembling and then declaring, “We’re going to crash into the ground!” A car’s dash cam captured the exact moment the plane slammed nose-first into the ground. And the Learjet 60’s precise GPS location, altitude and ground speed in its final minutes of fight were broadcast to the world via an automated system.
That flood of raw information enabled aviation enthusiasts and armchair pilots to begin dissecting the accident from afar before the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigators had even made it to the scene.
The theories and finger-pointing online seemed endless. It was pilot error, some said. The crew lacked experience. It was bad weather. A drone collision. Or it was a problem with the plane’s design.
“It created this firestorm,” said Guzzetti, who spent 17 years as an NTSB investigator. “And it’s not fair.”
The way the public thinks about aviation accidents has changed with the proliferation of open-source flight data tools such as air traffic audio and flight tracking software, along with the ubiquity of video cameras — in cars, door bells, light poles — and social media’s ability to spread that data far and wide.
The wealth of information invites immediate and important scrutiny of a tightly regulated industry.
But those early clues from open-source data also often paint a compelling-enough picture, resulting in a rush to judgment and little patience for the NTSB’s formal findings, which usually take a year or longer to emerge.
“Conclusions are being drawn within hours of a mishap,” said James Norman, a safety science researcher and commercial airline pilot.
“I understand why it happens. But there’s a tradeoff,” Norman said. “We don’t want safety management arbitrated by the public. We don’t want rumors and rushed conclusions.”
Those can prove hard to shake.
In January 2025, the online reaction was swift after the midair collision between an Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Eagle regional jet trying to land at Reagan National Airport. All 67 people aboard the two aircraft were killed.
Public flight data, air traffic radio transmissions and video of the collision were weaponized to assign blame. The controller failed to track the aircrafts, some commentators said. The plane’s pilots should’ve seen the helicopter. Others accused the airline pilots of ignoring warnings about the Black Hawk’s location. Others said the Black Hawk was “flying erratically” before the accident.
“We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions and ideas,” President Donald Trump said one day after the accident, channeling the online chatter and hinting, without evidence, that diversity-oriented hiring practices played some role.
The NTSB report, issued just over a year later, found most of the blame fell on the Federal Aviation Administration, which for years had allowed dangerous flight routes for military helicopters near a busy airport. The NTSB also said, among other factors, the helicopter’s instructor pilot had probably identified the wrong aircraft when he thought there was enough visual separation between the two aircraft.
“It’s public perception versus what is actually uncovered in an investigation,” Norman said.
Some aviation experts worry about the creep of amateur reconstruction into official proceedings.
That’s what happened at a Senate hearing in February 2023, when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) appeared to blame an air traffic controller for a near-miss runway incident in Austin.
Two weeks earlier, a FedEx plane had nearly landed on top of a Southwest jet on the runway. “They came incredibly close to crashing,” Cruz said.
To make his point, Cruz played a short clip that he said “is a reproduction but it’s based on flight data.”
But the realistic-looking video got critical details wrong, Norman said.
It showed a blue-sky day. The NTSB’s subsequent report showed the weather was actually overcast with dense fog. The controller couldn’t see the Southwest plane on the runway, the NTSB found. And the control tower didn’t have ground radar to monitor runway traffic. The NTSB blamed a combination of factors for the incident.
But at the hearing, without these findings, Cruz asked then-acting FAA administrator Billy Nolen how air traffic control could’ve allowed this to happen.
Nolen called for restraint.
“We’re letting the investigation play itself out,” he said.
The ability to reconstruct a plane crash from any laptop is a relatively recent change.
While the chatter between pilots and air traffic control had long been available to anyone with a scanner, in the early 2000s websites such as LiveATC made locally received transmissions easy to hear and retrieve online. Meanwhile, FAA-derived radar and flight-plan data began flowing to commercial tracking services in the late 1990s, finding bigger online audiences in the mid-2000s. And the FAA offered a searchable database for tail numbers, allowing the public to find out who owns any aircraft in most cases.
A major change came in 2020, when the FAA began requiring aircraft in much of the nation’s airspace to transmit location and speed data using a system known as ADS-B. A simple receiver can capture the public ADS-B signals. But websites now turn that data into a legible product for flights nationwide.
“I think the open-source data sometimes offers more capability than the government has,” said Jack Sweeney, a software engineer and founder of the Air Traffic website, which allows for real-time flight tracking via local ADS-B feeds.
Flight data used to be the exclusive domain of airlines and regulators. In the late 1960s, the U.S. began requiring most large aircraft to carry black boxes that include both a cockpit voice recorder and detailed flight data recorder.
But it wasn’t until the 1990s that airlines started using this data to improve safety outside of crash investigations, said Norman, who wrote a 2022 University of North Dakota paper on the changes. The FAA and airlines created programs to learn from the information after incidents like hard landings or severe turbulence. The goal wasn’t to punish pilots but make flying safer.
“For 20 years this program was humming along, everything was vanilla,” until the recent online spread of flight data services, he said.
“Now,” said Norman, “you have people on YouTube saying I know what happened: They flew into a thunderstorm and there was ice.”
The Learjet crash spurred many online commentators to blame the pilot’s decision to fly into a severe storm over Florida. Meteorologists provided detailed weather models. ADS-B data showed the plane’s path. That was synced up with the co-pilot’s radio transmissions with air traffic control.
It created a strong narrative — illustrated by online flight animations — of what supposedly happened to the charter jet on its way from Austin to the Bahamas carrying two pilots and seven passengers.
But access to all of this data creates an illusion that every question has been answered, Sweeney said.
“There are still so many assumptions” without the NTSB’s full investigation, he said. “It creates this thing where people who have no clue are saying this is exactly what is going on.”
Last week, many online commentators questioned the experience of the Learjet’s copilot, 20-year-old Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras, though she was not at the controls. Jeff Gregory, 55, was the plane’s captain.
“You have people making judgments about pilots or airline manufacturers that are harsh and not supported and it creates a lot of angst,” Guzzetti said.
Guzzetti, who now works as a air safety consultant, said pilots in other accidents have sometimes faced death threats stemming from online conjecture.
With the Learjet crash, the NTSB has only just started its inquiry.
On Monday, several days after people online had declared the mystery solved, the NTSB said it had recovered the plane’s cockpit voice recorder and was planning to examine it at a lab in Washington.
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