Copilot warned of ice, turbulence before fatal jet crash in Florida

To Florida now. Nine people are dead after a business jet crashed yesterday into a residential neighborhood. The fiery aftermath left behind a massive crater. No one on the ground was killed, but people did gather at the crash scene after narrowly avoiding disaster themselves. And the CBC's Jamie Strachan joins me now on set. And so, Jamie, what more do we know about what happened? Well, you saw those pictures there, and obviously this was a deadly crash of a plane that hit the ground with... Tremendous impact, we just heard from the NTSB, that's the federal investigative team, working on figuring out what happened here. But we know this was a flight that was traveling from Austin, Texas en route to the Bahamas. And one of the co-pilots who we now know was a 20-year-old woman, contacted authorities early on, letting them know that ice was an issue, but that they were dealing with it. Clearly, it became precipitously worse as the flight went on. Some of the audio released is quite harrowing. It's quite difficult to listen to. Here's a clip of the pilot talking to air traffic controllers. 9-3-7-0-2-Bravo-Delta. 7-2-2-Bravo-Delta, we're descending 8,000. Mayday, mayday, we're descending 10,000 feet per minute. That flight continued to descend and descend until it crashed into the ground in a busy residential neighborhood in Palm Beach County. And because of that, this could have been much worse, right? I can tell you, it's a place in Florida that I'm quite familiar with. I've spent many winters down right in this exact area when someone showed me on the map this morning where it hit. I knew exactly where it was, this is a densely populated residential area, the plane hit right on a roadway and created this massive crater and you know you can see Just how bad. The images are just unbelievable. Unbelievable. As you say, a crater. And people at the scene and investigators this morning saying, you know, they don't know how much of this plane that they'll recover. Not a lot of it was visible to people who were on the scene. But now, of course, the investigation begins into what happened, how this happened, and, of course, how it can be prevented in the future. Here's what the NTSB had to say to reporters a few moments ago. I'm getting conflicting information. It's half a mile by four-tenths of a mile, right? But it's scattered among ball fields, businesses, personal residences, and the debris is rather small. As I indicated, we do have some indication that the aircraft was breaking up for impact, and so some of this is yet to be determined. We may find parts of the aircraft some distance away from the actual impact site. You can hear the difficulty of this investigation. The NTSB indicating there that this plane was likely coming apart before impact. You can hear that there's pieces of this plane strewn over. You know, you can talk about the language of the investigator. A very residential area in people's backyards, on baseball fields. So piecing together exactly what happened, going to be a long, arduous process. Nine people dead. And as you mentioned, Andrew, given where this hit, the impact that it hit with, this could have been a lot worse. All right. Jamie, thank you. Thank you.