Important pieces from the tail of the doomed Learjet that crashed Sunday in Florida, killing all 9 people on board, had already separated from the aircraft before it hit the ground, investigators said.
The plane’s left elevator – a piece on the tail used to move it up and down – was found in three pieces in a range of around 1.3 to 3.8 miles from the accident site, National Transportation Safety Board spokesperson Thomas B. Chapman told a press conference Tuesday.
“It tells us that at least some components, some pieces of the aircraft, important pieces of the aircraft separated before the impact,” Chapman said.
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“What that means exactly in terms of what caused the aircraft to lose control, or whether the loss of this piece was a result of the forces on the aircraft, we don’t know yet. It’s going to take some more analysis.”
Chapman added that the distance the elevator pieces were found from the site meant they separated before the crash, rather than scattering on impact.
Stormy weather in Florida on Sunday at the time of the crash “remains a key focus of the investigation,” he said.
Chapman explained that storms that swept through Florida on Monday had hampered the investigation, but investigators spent Tuesday collecting and documenting evidence.
The jet was traveling from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas when it began falling at around 32,000 feet per minute before exploding in a massive fireball on the ground near a trailer park in Palm Springs, Florida.
It wiped out a young Texas family of four, their two friends and nanny — along with a veteran pilot and a 20-year-old co-pilot.
Multimillionaire tech exec Adam Robinson, 44, wife Helen Sharp, and their toddlers Emma, 4, and Charlie, 2, were among the victims, Robinson’s brother confirmed Monday.
Their friends Rachael Reed and Charmi Fehr and nanny Anita Maria Apellido Cetina were also killed in the tragedy.
The pilot in command was Jeff Gregory, 55, who appeared to recite the Lord’s Prayer in an Air Traffic Control radio transmission in the final seconds before the $2 million chartered Learjet 60 plunged into the ground and disintegrated.
Co-pilot Nathalia Filgueiras, 20, who got her pilot’s license while still in high school, was heard pleading for help in the final radio traffic before the deadly crash.