A private jet carrying nine people nosedived out of the sky and crashed into a Palm Beach County neighborhood on Sunday afternoon. Everyone on board was killed, and the impact left a burning crater in a residential street.
The Learjet 60 was flying from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas when it went into a steep dive. It fell more than 20,000 feet per minute before slamming into a road beside a mobile home community in Greenacres, Fla. Witness video showed debris across the roadway, downed power lines and fire and smoke pouring from the crater. Residents said the crash sounded like a missile strike. The site is less than eight miles from President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Outgoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called the disaster catastrophic.
Cockpit audio from the jet’s final seconds has added to the horror. On the recording, a male voice appears to recite the opening lines of the Lord’s Prayer as the plane hurtles toward the ground. At the same time, a female voice screams that they are about to crash. Moments earlier, the crew had issued a Mayday call.
The cause of the crash remains under investigation, but the crew’s last radio messages may offer a clue. Before the distress call, a pilot told Miami air traffic controllers that ice was building up on the aircraft, with the outside temperature at about minus 47 degrees Celsius. The National Transportation Safety Board has long warned about the dangers of icing. A 2024 safety alert cautioned that ice can disable flight instruments and leave a plane unable to hold level flight.
On Monday, the family of Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras, 20, confirmed to the New York Post that she was the co-pilot and the woman heard on the cockpit recording. Her stepfather, Thiago Corteleti, said she texted her boyfriend about 10 minutes before the crash and told him the flight had run into turbulence and ice.
Filgueiras grew up in Palm Beach County as the middle of three sisters. She fell in love with flying after rides in her father’s small Beechcraft Bonanza. In October 2023, as a 17-year-old senior at West Boca Raton High School, she earned her private pilot’s license through the school district’s new Aviation Academy. She could fly a plane before she had a driver’s license, and local television featured her story at the time.
She went on to graduate from American Flyers, a flight school with a branch in Pompano Beach. She added commercial, multi-engine and instrument ratings and became a certified flight instructor. She taught in Fort Lauderdale before taking a professional pilot job. She had been flying commercially for nine months and had logged about 1,300 hours. Her goal was to fly for a major airline, but she was still too young to apply.
Her mother, Camila, said she had always been proud of her daughter, even as she quietly feared that flying might one day take her away. Filgueiras would have turned 21 in January.
“Everybody was so impressed with her,” Camila said.
Authorities have not released the names of the other eight people who died. Officials planned to hold a news conference Monday to share more details. Federal investigators are expected to examine the plane’s maintenance records, the weather along its route and the icing reports made before the jet went down.
