Among the nine people aboard a private jet that plummeted to the ground on Sunday afternoon in Florida were a 20-year-old co-pilot and a Texas family that included two young children.
Everyone on the Bahamas-bound flight, which also carried a nanny to the children and two more friends of the family, died when the Learjet 60 crashed in a residential area of Palm Beach County, Fla., leaving a smoldering crater and wreckage in the street.
The pilot was Jeff Gregory, an aviator with years of experience, according to April Honnen, his former employer. His co-pilot was Nathalia Filgueiras.
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.
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 that 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.”
According to a joint statement on Monday by the families of the people on board, the plane’s passengers included Adam Robinson, Helen Sharp and their two children, Emma and Charlie. The family lived in Austin, in a neighborhood of bungalows and live oaks west of downtown. Mr. Robinson was the founder and chief executive of several technology companies. Ms. Sharp worked in public relations and had recently opened a ceramics studio.
“They were exceptional people,” said Kevin Sims, who sold a home to the family in 2019 and saw them trick-or-treating on Halloween. “They were young, dynamic, kind, generous, warm.”
With them on the plane were Anita Maria Cetina, a nanny who “cared for Emma and Charlie with tenderness and devotion,” the family statement said, and another couple, Rachael Reed and Charmi Fehr, who were “full of joy and adventure.”
The National Transportation Safety Board is leading an investigation into the crash, with assistance from the Federal Aviation Administration.
Upper Jets, the private charter firm, is cooperating with the authorities “to ensure an objective understanding of what occurred,” Thomas Noetzel, director of operations, said in a statement on Monday.
“We are committed to supporting the families of all those who lost a loved one yesterday, and are praying for them as we grieve together,” he added.
Thomas B. Chapman, a member of the N.T.S.B. , 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, 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.
She asked whether the plane could climb to 37,000 feet, but, soon after, she desperately declared mayday, a life-threatening emergency. Ms. Filgueiras 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.
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 was 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, Madaleine Rubin and Jesus Jiménez contributed reporting. Georgia Gee contributed research.
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