Victims have been identified after a Learjet traveling from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas crashed in the Palm Beach area Sunday, about nine miles from Mar-a-Lago. All nine people aboard died. The aircraft plunged at a high rate of speed, nosedived into a mobile home area, erupted into a giant fireball, and left a massive crater in the road. This was not a rough landing or a close call. It was a catastrophic crash, and the grim visuals quickly spread online.
The cause remains unknown. Severe thunderstorms impacted South Florida in the Palm Beach region that day, but the weather information does not by itself explain what happened. That detail matters because online commentators tend to turn every tragedy into an instant courtroom, complete with evidence gathered from a phone screen and a suspicious amount of confidence. The available report identifies the victims and describes the final moments, but it does not establish why the Learjet went down.
The pilot was Jeff Gregory, 55, and the co-pilot was Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras, 20. Nathalia reportedly texted her boyfriend, who was also a licensed pilot, about ten minutes before the crash: “I’ve got turbulence, I’ve got ice.”
According to TMZ, the passengers included Texas tech entrepreneur Adam Robinson, 44, his wife, Helen Sharp, and their two young children, Emma and Charlie. The Robinson family nanny, Anita Maria Cetina, also died, as did the family’s friends Rachael Reed and Charmi Fehr. The two pilots were also killed, bringing the total number of fatalities aboard the Learjet 60 to nine.
A post from Jon Nicosia showed the crash in a frame-by-frame video presentation:
The reported air traffic control audio is even more disturbing. It indicates the crew was dealing with turbulence and ice as the aircraft descended at an extreme rate. Nathalia shouted, “We are in an overspeed condition, descending 20,000 feet per minute,” and then, “We’re going to crash into the ground!”
She also shouted, “We are descending 22,000 feet!” as air traffic control offered help. Her last reported words were, “Holy f*ck, we’re out of time!” The audio then cut off. The associated video and audio material are included here:
The crash also puts an earlier post from Robinson in a particularly grim light. In April, he wrote, “You don’t need to crash a plane to learn to fly … and you don’t need VC to build a business.” At the time, it was a business-minded observation. After Sunday’s disaster, the wording carries a much darker edge, because old social media posts have a nasty habit of resurfacing at the worst possible moment.
Robinson’s post is included below:
The identities of those aboard have now been reported, while the cause of the crash remains unknown. The facts are grim enough without adding internet speculation to a tragedy that claimed an entire aircraft.
