Learjet's tail found 3.8 miles from crash site, suggesting mid-air breakup

Parts of the Learjet 60 that crashed in Palm Beach County on Sunday were found nearly four miles from the impact crater, federal investigators announced Tuesday — a distribution of wreckage that points to the plane beginning to break apart while still in the air.

At a news conference, National Transportation Safety Board member Tom Chapman said debris from the aircraft turned up as far as 3.8 miles from where the plane went down. The elevator — the tail surface that controls a plane's nose-up and nose-down movement — was recovered in three separate pieces scattered between roughly 1.3 and 3.8 miles from the crash site.

The function of the elevator is to control the pitch up and down. At those speeds I don't know that it would've been effective even if it had still been attached to the aircraft, but knowing that it was lost is a very important piece of evidence in terms of pointing us towards other things to investigate.— Tom Chapman, NTSB Board Member

Without an intact elevator, the pilots would have been unable to pull the jet out of its nosedive, Chapman said.

All nine people aboard were killed when the jet, traveling from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas, struck a roadway near Greenacres and erupted in a fireball on Sunday.

In the minutes before the crash, co-pilot Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras, 20, reported to air traffic controllers that ice was building up on the aircraft and that severe turbulence had tossed it up and down by more than 700 feet. She then declared mayday. Air traffic control recordings captured her voice growing increasingly alarmed as the jet plunged, according to CBS News.

Family and friends identified the other pilot as Jeff Gregory, 55. As the plane descended, a man's voice could be heard in the background reciting the Lord's Prayer; friends said they believe it was Gregory, who was described as a devout Christian.

Among those killed were passengers Adam Robinson and Helen Sharp, an Austin couple, their two young children — Emma, 4, and Charlie, 2 — and Rachael Reed, Charmi Fehr, and Anita Maria Cetina.

Three years ago, when Filgueiras was a high school senior in Boca Raton, CBS News Miami affiliate WPEC featured a profile of her; at that point she had already obtained her pilot's license before ever getting a driver's license.

The NTSB investigation remains ongoing, with further wreckage recovery and analysis planned. All findings so far are preliminary.

Why it matters — The discovery of tail debris miles from the crash site is the first concrete physical evidence that the Learjet was disintegrating before impact, a finding that will shape the direction of the federal investigation into what caused nine people to die.

Reported by cbsnews.com, southfloridareporter.com