One of the pilots of a private jet that plummeted to the ground on Sunday afternoon in Florida, killing all nine people on board, was a 20-year-old aviator named Nathalia Filgueiras, her mother said on Monday.
Ms. Filgueiras, of Boca Raton, Fla., had logged more than 1,300 hours of flight time and received her pilot’s license at 17, according to her mother, Camila Corteleti. She said her daughter had worked for Upper Jets, a private charter firm based in Fort Lauderdale, and was co-pilot of Sunday’s flight.
The other pilot on the jet has not been identified, and it’s not known who was at the controls when the plane began to fall.
Ms. Corteleti said her daughter had been passionate about flying since childhood, a love forged soaring the skies with her father, who is a recreational pilot. She recalled that her daughter, as a child, used to enjoy going to the Boca Raton Airport to watch planes taking off and landing, and she announced when she was about 12 that she wanted to be a pilot.
“She loved the freedom,” Ms. Corteleti said. “It was completely different seeing the world from the top.”
Three years ago, Ms. Filgueiras, then a senior in high school, was interviewed by TV news reporters, because she had gotten her private pilot’s license even before her driver’s license. “I like being different than everyone,” she told CBS12, a news outlet based in South Florida.
Efforts to reach Upper Jets were not immediately successful.
The company’s plane, a Learjet 60, which had been traveling from Texas to the Bahamas, crashed down in a residential area of Palm Beach County, Fla., leaving a smoldering crater and wreckage in the street.
The authorities said that everyone on the plane had died, but did not identify them. Officials said it did not appear that any people on the ground had been injured.
Thomas B. Chapman, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, told reporters at a Monday afternoon news conference in Florida that investigators had not yet recovered a cockpit voice recorder, and that they could not yet say whether one was on the plane.
The agency has just begun documenting the crash scene, which will take several days, said Timothy W. Monville, an investigator with the board. “The biggest obstacle that we’re going to have is recovering the major wreckage from the impacted crater on the roadway,” he said.
In the moments before the plane crashed, a pilot — the authorities have not confirmed whether it was Ms. Filgueiras — radioed air traffic controllers. She said that the plane was facing rain, and “light, clear ice that is manageable, and moderate turbulence,” according to archived communications with air traffic controllers in Miami.
The woman asked whether the plane could climb to 37,000 feet, but, soon after, she desperately declared mayday, a life-threatening emergency. The woman screamed into the radio that the plane was descending at a rate of 20,000 feet per minute. “We’re going to crash into the ground,” she said.
Dr. Robert Joslin, an aviation expert and associate professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, said in an interview that a two-person cockpit typically has a pilot flying and a pilot monitoring, or P.F. and P.M. — positions commonly described as pilot and co-pilot.
It is not uncommon for young aviators to serve as pilot monitors on small jets, he said, so that they can log flight hours and move onto bigger aircraft.
Given that Ms. Filgueiras seems to have been handling radio communications, she was almost certainly the pilot monitoring, Dr. Joslin said. Her work probably involved not only communications but also keeping a close eye on the cockpit’s many instruments and gauges, while the pilot flying would have had more physical control over the aircraft.
Jared Isaacman, the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, wrote on social media on Monday that it was too early to speculate on what might have gone wrong.
Mr. Isaacman said that Ms. Filgueiras “was doing her job, communicating with A.T.C. right to the end in a terrifying situation.”
“She likely knew before many of those calls that she was going to die,” he said.
Karoun Demirjian contributed reporting.
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