The black box of a private charter plane that crashed in Florida has been recovered

Abstract:

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced that it has recovered the cabin voice recorder (CVR) of the Learjet 60 business jet in Greenacres, Florida, and the excavation work at the impact site has been basically completed.

The CVR has been sent to the NTSB laboratory in Washington for interpretation. As for why there is only a CVR but not an FDR (flight data recorder), the latter is only mandatory for aircraft with more than ten seats. The Learjet 60 only has 7-8 people on board, which does not meet the mandatory installation threshold. Models with a passenger capacity of up to 6 must be equipped with CVR.

The CVR loop recording period of new aircraft must be up to 25 hours. Old aircraft will also gradually undergo modifications and the loop recording period will be only

2 hours

Since the Learjet 60 that crashed on November 1 was not a new aircraft, and it was far away from the upgrade deadline (May 16, 2030), the operator was not so willing to spend its own money to upgrade the cabin sound recorder to a new model, which meant that the recording of the aircraft during the departure stage (Austin, Texas) would be overwritten.

The Learjet 60 private charter flight with registration number N722BD was piloted by Captain Jeff Gregory and co-pilot Natalia Gadelia Filgueiras, carrying 7 people. It took off from Austin Bergstrom Airport at 10:37 ET and crashed in Palm Beach, Florida at around 12:49, with a flight duration of 2 hours and 12 minutes.

NTSB confirmed at a press conference on November 3, local time, that the horizontal tail of the aircraft separated from the fuselage before hitting the ground, and that the left elevator was broken into three parts, which were found 2.1 to 6.1 kilometers away from the impact site.

Co-pilot Natalia was less than 21 years old when she was involved in the accident. Flight instructor Chris Kirk strongly supported the female student as a flying genius: "There is no doubt that she is the most talented pilot I have ever taught, and I have been teaching for 40 years," Kirk said.

“This girl is born to fly, and the instructors are amazed every time she takes the flight test. The total flight time when she obtained the Lear class license was less than 1,100 hours, but she easily passed the PIC class test, and the examiner thought she had 5,000 hours of flying experience!”

When teaching the spiral recovery, the master and the apprentice did the spiral so many times that the instructor began to feel sick, but Natalia remained calm as usual. Kirk believes that Natalia took the license test out of her love for flying rather than the treatment of a commercial pilot:

"Natalia was passionate about flying! She was a born pilot! I pray she continues to soar in the clouds in heaven, may she rest in peace."