Plane Crash US Florida
A 20-year-old woman who had been a licensed pilot since she was a teenager and a Colorado technology entrepreneur and his family were among nine people killed when a small jet crashed and exploded in South Florida, family members told the Associated Press.
The doomed Learjet co-pilot heard pleading for help in harrowing air traffic control audio before the fiery Florida crash has been identified as Nathalia Gadelh
a Filgueiras – a 20-year-old who got her pilot license while still in high school.
Filgueiras’s mother, Camila, and her stepfather confirmed to The Post that she was the co-pilot flying a Learjet 60 from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas when it entered a steep nosedive – plummeting at over 20,000 feet per minute – and smashed into the ground in Palm Beach County on Sunday afternoon.
The grieving mom said that her daughter, who would have turned 21 in January, had been working as a commercial pilot for nine months.
“I knew that a plane was gonna take her away from me. I always knew it but I was so proud of her. I know she was living her dream,” she said.
Camila’s husband, Thiago Corteleti, 44, told The Post that Filgueiras had 1,300 hours of flying experience.
She texted her boyfriend, Justin, just 10 minutes before the plane crashed, he said.
“She just said, ‘I’ve got turbulence, I’ve got ice,'” Corteleti said.
The young aviator, who grew up in Palm Beach County, was previously featured in local media when she got her private pilot’s license at just 17 back in October 2023 — before she even had her driver’s license.
“One day after flying with him, she came home, and we were in our room, and she walked in, and she said, ‘I’m gonna be a pilot’ and I said, ‘No, you won’t,” Camila said through tears.
“Thiago looked at me, and said, ‘If that’s what she wants to be, she will be a pilot,’ and I was like, ‘No she won’t,'” she said.
Her family often shared posts on social media of them flying in private jets together. The School District of Palm Beach County’s Aviation Academy paid for her pilot’s license after introducing the program that year, in 2023.
“I like being different than everyone, so to me I think it’s cool that like it’s not really an opportunity,” Filgueiras said.
“I just didn’t do it, and this is how it ended up. But I think it’s cool. Some people think that it’s weird that I can fly planes, but I can’t drive a car, I mean I can but, a lot of people think it’s funny. I think it’s funny, and I now want my [driver’s] license really bad,” she added.
About 600 people are in need of shelter because the damage on the ground is blocking the entrance of a mobile home park, said Joel Flores, Palm Beach County commissioner for District 3, who was the first county official at the scene. Residents are being sent to two shelters in the county while the site is being investigated, he said.
Dash cam video showing the crash is going to be important to investigators piecing together what happened, said Mary Schiavo, CNN aviation analyst and former inspector general for the Transportation Department.
“That is not a controlled descent,” Schiavo told CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield Sunday. “It’s clear, whatever happened, they had lost control of the plane.”
Investigators will also have to piece together whether the environment played a part in the crash.
Ice on wings and other surfaces can also pose a major threat to private jets. In January 2024, the NTSB published a safety alert underscoring the risks of in-flight icing conditions, which can cause pilots to lose control. The agency warned ice can “make managing the airplane’s flightpath and airspeed more difficult and can prevent the airplane from maintaining level flight.”
Filgueiras said her dream was to become a commercial airline pilot one day, but she was still too young to apply for a job at American Airlines, according to her family.
She graduated from American Flyers, an Addison, Texas-based flying school with a branch in Pompano Beach, Florida.
“How often do you see 2 pilots under 21 with a commercial, multi-engine, instrument, CFI/CFI-I [Certified Flight Instructor/Certified Flight Instructor – Instrument],” she wrote in the overlay text.
After gaining her license, Filgueiras started working as an instructor at another school in Fort Lauderdale before getting another pilot job.
West Palm Beach, Nov 3 (AP): A business jet that crashed in South Florida with nine people aboard, including a family with two young children, likely started breaking apart before it slammed into the ground and erupted in a fireball, a federal investigator said Monday.
Video recorded by passersby captured the Bahamas-bound Learjet's rapid nosedive Sunday afternoon before it exploded in Greenacres, about 7 miles (11 kilometers) southwest of West Palm Beach. Flames flickered around chunks of pavement lining the crater as shocked residents looked on in horror. Thick black smoke engulfed the crash site and little remained of the plane.
The victims included 20-year-old co-pilot Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras, as well as technology entrepreneur Adam Robinson, his wife, Helen Sharp, and their two young children, relatives said.
National Transportation Safety Board member Tom Chapman said during a news conference Monday that investigators found evidence the aircraft started breaking up before it hit the ground and that debris from the aircraft could be spread far and wide.
Jeff Guzzetti, a former investigator for the NTSB and the Federal Aviation Administration, said key components of the jet's tail may have been lost during the turbulence or as it nose-dived, making the plane impossible to control.
"That very well could explain the missile-like profile just before it hit the ground," he said.
Weather conditions will be a major focus of the investigation, Chapman said. Rain pounded the region on Sunday, and one of the pilots told air traffic control about icing conditions at a high altitude.
A private jet traveling from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas careened into the ground in Palm Beach County, Florida, Sunday afternoon, leaving a deep crater and burning debris just feet from nearby homes and businesses and killing all nine on board, officials say.
Video from a passing vehicle shows the jet, a Learjet 60, slamming down nose first on a busy roadway in a flash before a fireball erupts.
“It was a cataclysmic plane crash,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said. “It looked like a missile going down.”
There were no immediate reports of anyone on the ground injured.
Before the crash, the pilot calmly reported ice accumulating on the aircraft, with an outside air temperature of -47 degrees Celsius, and moderate turbulence, bouncing the plane by up to 700 feet, according to a recording of air traffic control radio calls captured by LiveATC.net.
But moments later, the pilot began to sound more panicked.
Officials have not said what caused the jet to crash, and they have not identified the nine who died or said how many were passengers and crew.
There were scattered storms in the area at the time, and the plane passed through a stronger storm cell a few minutes before it began descending, but it is unclear if the storm contributed to the crash.
A news conference is expected Monday as authorities from the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board investigate.’
“Mayday, mayday,” the pilot told the Miami Air Route Traffic Control Center. “We’re descending 10,000 feet per minute!”
“We are in an overspeed condition descending 20,000 feet per minute,” they yelled, “We’re going to crash into the ground!”
The jet descended 27,000 feet over the course of one minute, just before flight tracking data cut off, the website ADS-B Exchange shows.
The crash marks the second deadliest plane crash in the United States this year, according to NTSB records, after 12 people died in June when a skydiving plane crashed in Butler, Missouri. It is also the worst crash involving a Learjet 60, according to data from the Flight Safety Foundation. In 2008, four people were killed when a Learjet 60 bound for Los Angeles crashed on takeoff from Columbia, South Carolina.
The plane hit the ground shortly before 1 p.m. on Military Trail, a major thoroughfare between Cresthaven Boulevard and 10th Avenue North, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office said. The roadway was left shattered and burning debris dotted the crater, video from CNN affiliate WPBF showed.
“There is a lot of debris that was strewn as a result of this crash,” DeSantis said.
It’s not clear if the plane had a cockpit voice recorder on board, but FAA regulations require jet aircraft with more than one engine to carry a voice recorder if they are flown for hire.
Posted on 2026/11/03 08:47 AM