Witnesses who called 911 after a Learjet crashed in Palm Beach County struggled to describe what they had seen. One caller thought a “bomb” had gone off, according to recordings of the calls.
The Learjet 60 left Austin-Bergstrom International Airport at about 10:37 a.m. on Nov. 1, bound for North Eleuthera Airport in the Bahamas. Shortly before 1 p.m., it crashed in Palm Beach County, killing all nine people aboard.
In calls made around 12:51 p.m., witnesses told dispatchers they were trying to understand what had happened. One woman said she heard an explosion and thought an aircraft or rocket had fallen from the sky. She said her home shook before the blast, and that the power briefly went out.
When she went outside, she saw smoke and sparks. The scene looked dark and black, she told the operator, as if something were burning. At first, she wondered whether the boom was thunder, but said it didn’t sound like lightning.
The crash killed Austin technology entrepreneur Adam Robinson, 45; his wife, Helen Sharp, 40; their children, Emma, 4, and Charlie, 2; and the children’s nanny, Anita Maria Cetina. Rachael Reed and Charmi Fehr were also aboard, as were pilots Jeffrey Gregory and Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras.
Heavy rain and thunderstorms were moving across South Florida when the plane crashed. Federal investigators have said weather will be a major focus of their investigation.
The National Transportation Safety Board said Monday that investigators recovered the Learjet’s cockpit voice recorder at the crash site near Greenacres, Florida. The recorder will be examined at the agency’s Vehicle Recorders Laboratory in Washington, D.C.
