Pieces of jet that crashed in Palm Beach County found miles away from impact site, NTSB says

Pieces of the jet that crashed in Palm Beach County on Sunday, killing nine people, were found nearly 4 miles away from the crash site, investigators said Tuesday. 

National Transportation Safety Board member Tom Chapman said during a news conference that the discovery of a part of the tail located that far from the impact crater was an indication the plane was likely breaking up before it hit the ground.

He said parts of the plane were located as far as 3.8 miles from the impact site.

Chapman said the tail’s elevator was broken into three parts. Without that intact, the pilots would not have been able to pull the Learjet 60 out of its nosedive.

“The function of the elevator is to control the pitch up and down,” he said. “At those speeds I don’t know that it would’ve been effective even if it had still been attached to the aircraft, but knowing that it was lost is a very important piece of evidence in terms of pointing us towards other things to investigate.”

Chapman acknowledged Monday that parts of the jet likely started to break off before it struck the ground. The co-pilot, 20-year-old Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras, told air traffic controllers minutes before the crash that ice was accumulating on the plane and that severe turbulence had thrown it up and down by more than 700 feet, before declaring “mayday.”

Filgueiras can be heard saying in air traffic control audio recordings that the jet was rapidly descending. The messages grew increasingly alarming before the Learjet 60, which was traveling from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas, ultimately crashed and erupted in a fireball.

Victims of jet that crashed in Palm Beach County identified

The passengers who died in the crash have been identified as Adam Robinson and Helen Sharp, a couple from Austin; their two young children, Emma, 4, and Charlie, 2; Rachael Reed, Charmi Fehr and Anita Maria Cetina.

The other pilot was identified by family and friends as Jeff Gregory, 55.

As the plane was plunging toward the ground, a man’s voice could be heard reciting the Lord’s Prayer in the background. Friends said they’re convinced it was Gregory, who was a devout Christian.

CBS News Miami’s West Palm Beach affiliate, WPEC, interviewed Filgueiras three years ago, when she was a high school senior in Boca Raton. She received her pilot’s license before her driver’s license.