The doomed Learjet co-pilot heard pleading for help in harrowing air traffic control audio before the fiery Florida crash has been identified as Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras – a 20-year-old who got her pilot license while still in high school.
Filgueiras’s mother, Camila, and her stepfather confirmed to The Post that she was the co-pilot flying a Learjet 60 from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas when it entered a steep nosedive – plummeting at over 20,000 feet per minute – and smashed into the ground in Palm Beach County on Sunday afternoon.
The grieving mom said that her daughter, who would have turned 21 in January, had been working as a commercial pilot for nine months.
@itsnatfilg/Threads
“I wanted her to live her dream, but I knew that her dream was going to be the thing that would take her away from me,” Camila said from her home in Palm Beach County.
“I knew that a plane was gonna take her away from me. I always knew it but I was so proud of her. I know she was living her dream,” she said.
Camila’s husband, Thiago Corteleti, 44, told The Post that Filgueiras had 1,300 hours of flying experience.
She texted her boyfriend, Justin, just 10 minutes before the plane crashed, he said.
“She just said, ‘I’ve got turbulence, I’ve got ice,’” Corteleti said.
The young aviator, who grew up in Palm Beach County, was previously featured in local media when she got her private pilot’s license at just 17 back in October 2023 — before she even had her driver’s license.
Palm Beach County Learjet crash site
“I definitely do brag because people say, ‘Oh, you can’t drive,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, but I can fly,’” she told CBS12 in an interview at the time.
The West Boca Raton High School senior explained that she began pilot lessons in 2020, but was also taught by her dad, who learned flying for fun in 2018.
The middle of three sisters, Filgueiras dreamed of becoming a pilot from a young age after being taken out in her father’s small Beechcraft Bonanza.
“One day after flying with him, she came home, and we were in our room, and she walked in, and she said, ‘I’m gonna be a pilot’ and I said, ‘No, you won’t,” Camila said through tears.
“Thiago looked at me, and said, ‘If that’s what she wants to be, she will be a pilot,’ and I was like, ‘No she won’t,’” she said.
Her family often shared posts on social media of them flying in private jets together. The School District of Palm Beach County’s Aviation Academy paid for her pilot’s license after introducing the program that year, in 2023.
“I like being different than everyone, so to me I think it’s cool that like it’s not really an opportunity,” Filgueiras said.
“I just didn’t do it, and this is how it ended up. But I think it’s cool. Some people think that it’s weird that I can fly planes, but I can’t drive a car, I mean I can but, a lot of people think it’s funny. I think it’s funny, and I now want my [driver’s] license really bad,” she added.
Filgueiras said her dream was to become a commercial airline pilot one day, but she was still too young to apply for a job at American Airlines, according to her family.
She graduated from American Flyers, an Addison, Texas-based flying school with a branch in Pompano Beach, Florida.
