Executive jet crash in Florida kills nine and reopens debate on storm technology
Former NTSB Investigator Tells Fox Business Tragedy Was Preventable; 20-year-old co-pilot was among the victims, and the search for the black box continues.
BY THE X-TRADER NEWS NEWSROOM · REPORTING FROM FOX BUSINESS · 3 MIN
A business jet that left Austin, Texas, heading for the Bahamas crashed on Sunday in a residential area in Palm Beach County, Florida, and killed the nine people on board, including the co-pilot, who was just 20 years old. The information was presented by the Fox Business channel, which also released new details of the final communication with air traffic control.
According to the channel, a technology businessman from Texas, his wife, two young children, the nanny and family friends were also on the plane. The aircraft had been in the air for two hours and 12 minutes when it encountered a storm cell over Florida.
The copilot reported shortly after that she was losing altitude. Less than a minute later, air traffic control lost contact with the plane, which crashed near a major county road, about 10 miles (16 km) from Mar-a-Lago.
An avoidable tragedy, says expert
Charlie Pereira, a former NTSB investigator (the American body that investigates transport accidents), evaluated the case on the program. According to him, pilots normally go around or climb above storm cells, and everything indicates that this is what they tried to do. He noted that it is not known what data was available to the crew and air control.
Pereira explained why the pilot's voice is not heard in the recordings. In two-person crews, he said, whoever is not piloting takes care of communications, and whoever is piloting focuses on the flight. Therefore, he said, it is possible to assume that the co-pilot was the one speaking on the radio. For him, the episode was a “completely avoidable” tragedy.
The Precedent of Terrain Alerts
The expert recalled that, around 30 years ago, controlled flight against terrain killed approximately one thousand people per year. According to him, technology developed from safety recommendations he wrote at the NTSB, in partnership with Honeywell, created ground proximity warning systems that virtually eliminated these deaths.
In Pereira's assessment, the industry already has the technology to do the same with storms. What is missing, he said, is for the FAA (US civil aviation authority) and the NTSB to act so that these systems are implemented.
Pereira said he did not know whether the plane, which he described as an older aircraft, around 20 years old, had this type of equipment. He praised the model as one of the best high-altitude, high-speed executive jets ever produced, but said he did not know what data display technologies the aircraft had.
Starlink and the role of regulators
The former investigator also defended that Starlink, Elon Musk's company, works with regulators to allow the use of its service on planes like this. According to him, the system currently blocks use on board when it detects a certain speed, as it understands that the user is on a plane. With access to online data, he stated, it would be possible to avoid accidents.
Pereira also said he gave testimony last week in a case about a 2019 executive jet accident in Mexico, in which the aircraft flew into a storm and everyone died. The case, according to him, is coming to trial and is very similar to the one in Florida.
The presenter noted that the NTSB says it is optimistic and that there is a black box to be analyzed. The transcript does not provide information about the effects of the accident on the markets. For readers in the financial sector, the debate points to the possibility of new safety regulatory requirements in executive aviation, which have not yet been defined.
Automatically translated from Portuguese.
