Elevator Almost Four Miles From Learjet Crash Site

Pieces of the left elevator from a Learjet 60 that crashed near Palm Beach Florida were found as far as 3.8 miles from the crash site the NTSB told reporters on Tuesday. In their second news conference on the accident that occurred Sunday in a residential area of Greenacres in Palm Beach County. Board member Tom Chapman said the elevator was in three pieces and it would have been impossible to control the plane, which dove almost vertically at very high speed into a roadside in the community. Chapman said “knowing that it was lost is a very important piece of evidence in terms of pointing us towards other things to investigate.” Facebook posts reporting the location of elevator pieces were posted late Monday.

The aircraft was on its way from Austin, Texas to the Bahamas with two crew and seven passengers onboard. The crew threaded through a line of thunderstorms over South Florida before passing over the core of a cell just south of Palm Beach. The first officer, who was the pilot monitoring, told ATC that they were picking up ice and asked to climb from 35,000 to 37,000 feet. Seconds later she told ATC the aircraft was descending rapidly. The plane was calculated to have reached a descent rate of more than 30,000 feet per minute.

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