Jet that crashed in Florida carried young Texas family and friends on holiday

Among the nine people aboard a private jet that plummeted to the ground 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, Florida, 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.

Filgueiras, of Boca Raton, Florida, had logged more than 1300 hours of flight time and received her pilot’s licence 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.

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,” Corteleti said. “It was completely different seeing the world from the top.”

According to a joint statement 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, Texas, in a neighbourhood of bungalows and live oaks west of downtown. Robinson was a founder and CEO of several technology companies. 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.”

Efforts to reach Upper Jets were not immediately successful. At the company’s offices at the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport, an employee who answered the door said management personnel were unable to talk to a reporter because they were meeting with federal authorities.

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, Filgueiras radioed air traffic controllers. She said the plane was facing rain, “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. Filgueras 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 PF and PM — 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 Filgueiras was handling radio communications, she was almost certainly the pilot monitoring, 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 Monday that it was too early to speculate on what might have gone wrong.

Isaacman said that Filgueiras “was doing her job, communicating with ATC right to the end in a terrifying situation.

“She likely knew before many of those calls that she was going to die,” he said.