A 20-year-old was a pilot of the jet that plunged to earth in Florida
The mother of Nathalia Filgueiras said her daughter had logged more than 1,300 hours of flight time and earned her pilot’s license at 17.
One pilot of the private jet that plummeted to the ground Sunday afternoon in Florida, killing all nine people on board, was a 20-year-old aviator named Nathalia Filgueiras, her mother said Monday.
Filgueiras, of Boca Raton, Fla., had logged more than 1,300 hours of flight time and earned her pilot’s license at 17, according to her mother, Camila Corteleti. She said her daughter had worked for Upper Jets, a private charter firm based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Corteleti said her daughter had been passionate about flying since childhood, a love forged soaring the skies with her father, who is a recreational pilot. She recalled that her daughter, as a child, used to enjoy going to the Boca Raton Airport to watch planes taking off and landing, and she announced when she was about 12 that she wanted to be a pilot.
“She loved the freedom,” Corteleti said. “It was completely different seeing the world from the top.”
Corteleti said her daughter had been co-pilot of the plane. She did not know the identity of the pilot, and it was unclear who was at the controls when the plane began to fall. Efforts to reach Upper Jets were not immediately successful.
The private jet, a Learjet 60, which had been traveling from Texas to the Bahamas, crashed down in a residential area of Palm Beach County, Fla., leaving a smoldering crater and wreckage in the street. Investigators were working on Monday to determine what happened.
In 2023, CBS12, a news outlet based in South Florida, reported that Filgueiras had gotten her private pilot’s license when she was a senior in high school. “I like being different than everyone,” she said in a video interview at the time.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement Sunday that all of the people on the plane had died. There was no information available about the identities of the passengers. Officials said it did not appear that any people on the ground had been injured.
In the moments before the plane crashed, a pilot radioed air traffic controllers, and she said the plane was facing rain, ice that was light and clear, and manageable and moderate turbulence, according to archived communications with air traffic controllers in Miami on Sunday afternoon.
The pilot asked if she could climb to 37,000 feet, but soon after she desperately declared mayday, a life-threatening emergency, to air traffic controllers. She screamed that the plane was descending at a rate of 20,000 feet per minute. “We’re going to crash into the ground,” she said.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
