Florida crash: How did this private jet fall out of the sky? | About That

We'll start with a warning. This is the exact moment before a plane crashes in Palm Beach County, Florida. It's a private jet, nine people on board, no survivors. The crash itself, hard to make out anything except fire and smoke. Smoke. The aftermath is hard to believe. This crater in the ground that looks more like a meteorite strike than a plane crash. But worse than that is how horrible it is to hear one of the pilots of the plane speaking with air traffic control in the minute or so before the crash. She's calm Moderate turbulence, plus or minus, okay, now 700 feet, 600 feet. But then her voice becomes more and more panicked right up until the moment she and others on the plane realize they will not survive. Now I won't play the worst of it for you but those recordings are right now the single most important piece of evidence in explaining what happened. How did a plane go from experiencing moderate turbulence to suddenly falling out of the sky? There's a cataclysmic plane crash it looked like a missile. So it's Sunday morning. This Learjet 60, a mid-sized business jet, takes off from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in Texas, heading to North Eleuthera in the Bahamas. But at roughly 35,000 feet near West Palm Beach and less than an hour away from landing, one of the pilots reports a problem. 722BD, 350, moderate turbulence, plus or minus, okay now 700 feet, 600 feet. Okay, so there are a few parts to this you should understand. First, you'll hear the plane's tail numbers over and over again. November 722 Bravo Delta. That just refers to the registration number N722BD. You'll hear though they often shorten this down leaving out some letters and numbers once they've established a rapport. When the pilot follows up with 350 though That's her assigned altitude. Flight level 350 is 35,000 feet. But she's saying turbulence is blowing her off that number by a lot. Moderate turbulence, plus or minus, okay, now 700 feet, 600 feet. So moderate turbulence means that the air... So that's the first problem. The second is the temperature. So Roger, say outside air temperature. Negative 47 degrees Celsius. We're managing the ice, but it is moderate turbulence. Minus 47 degrees Celsius. That's actually not unusual for a plane traveling at 35,000 feet, but this extreme cold has a potentially dangerous interplay with a third problem. Roger, November Bravo Delta. Now we're picking up precipitation. We need to climb 370, November Bravo Delta. Asking to climb 370 is asking to climb 2,000 feet from 35,000 to 37,000, presumably to escape the worst of this storm cell that she's reported to have flown through. She's granted permission to do so because, I'm guessing, at this point, having now encountered three issues, turbulence, freezing cold, and moisture, that air traffic control is at least aware that things can now go Very quickly. When moisture hits a plane flying through deep freeze temperatures those droplets can super cool insta-freeze on contact causing ice to form on critical parts of the plane. Icing is always is always something that should be taken seriously regardless of the aircraft. Light jets like the Learjet are certainly more susceptible to flight disturbance due to icing because the airfoil of the wing is so thin, it's razor thin. So not much of an obstruction of the smoothness of the airfoil would... Disrupt lift on that aircraft. Flying in these kinds of icy environments requires special training. Transport Canada, for example, in this evaluation of the Learjet 60 from almost 20 years ago, recommends under the heading of special event training that pilots should understand how to operate the aircraft in icing environments, including super cooled liquid droplet events. Now, I want to underline here, we simply don't know. How big a role ice may have played in causing this plane to crash. The investigation hasn't happened yet, and all we know is what the pilot reported experiencing. But planes like the Learjet 60 are built knowing that ice can pose a critical danger. There are systems on board meant to protect against ice as the plane flies. For example, by circulating and redirecting hot engine air to critical components. Electrical heating elements can also form part of this protective layer. But in the past, these systems have raised red flags. In 1999, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued an Airworthiness Directive, which you can think of as a legal safety order, pointing out the dangers of undetected ice on the Learjet's horizontal stabilizer, which is just part of the plane that helps keep the plane level. If left unattended could result in the loss of pitch control and consequent reduced controllability of the airplane. Again, not saying this was the cause, just raising, based on what the pilot reported, some of what investigators will be exploring. If you have icing on the leading edge of that horizontal stabilizer, it stops working, and the plane goes like this, and you get into a nose-down position. So that's the danger of icing at this altitude. Ice is no joke, and it's somewhere around this point, after the pilot has reported turbulence, temperature, and a storm. That everything seems to go wrong very suddenly. I'll play about 30 seconds of what happens. Repeating the warning that I gave you at the start. Which is that this is terrible to listen to knowing how it ends. 722 Bravo Delta, we're descending 8,000. Mayday, mayday, we're descending 10,000 feet per minute. November 722 Bravo Delta, roger. Declared emergency, 722 Bravo Delta. We are in an overspeed condition. What we then hear moments later is the last thing we hear from the crew on the audio recordings, which is a voice from the plane saying, we're out of time. While the plane was in that nose down position, it was descending at a rate of about a 40 story building every second. We do have, um... So, knowing all this, you watch that video again. The dashcam pointing backwards and in the blink of an eye this plane plummets into the ground like a rocket ship pointed the wrong way. There is no way to survive this kind of crash, not at that speed, but what is absolutely incredible is if you look around homes, cars, people, there's pretty clear property destruction here, but I've yet to hear any reports of people being killed on the ground. That is a miracle, something to bear in mind as investigators try to figure out how this even happened in the first place. Thank you.