Family of four, two close friends and nanny also died in crash as pilot identified as 55-year-old Jeff Gregory

Nathalia Filgueiras, 20, was co-pilot of the private Learjet 60 en route from Austin-Bergstrom international airport in Texas to North Eleuthera airport in the Bahamas on Sunday when it suddenly plummeted out of the sky, killing all onboard, her mother told the New York Times.

Later on Monday, the family of the passengers who died posted a statement on Facebook identifying the victims and paying tribute to them.

It named them as Adam Robinson, 45, a Texas-based technology entrepreneur; his wife Helen Sharp, 40; and their children, Emma, four, and Charlie, two. The statement said close family friends Rachael Reed and Charmi Fehr were also killed, along with Anita Maria Cetina, the children’s nanny.

The pilot in charge of the Learjet was identified by TMZ and other media outlets on Monday as Jeff Gregory, 55, an experienced aviator from Pennsylvania.

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[+] -60 points 1 day ago (23 children)
  • [–] 26 points 1 day ago* (9 children)

    dude, the horizontal stabilizer was ripped off. they flat out said on the radio they exceeded speed thresholds of the aircraft. the plane got caught in a thunderstorm, got damaged, and lost control.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago

    the plane got caught in a thunderstorm, got damaged, and lost control.

    We don't have enough information yet for this assumption. It could either be the damage caused loss of control, or the loss of control caused the damage

    The pilots reported icing shortly before the loss of control, which can absolutely cause uncontrolled descents. Overspeed can cause the loss of horizonstal stabs

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  • [+] -10 points 1 day ago (7 children)

    I haven't seen any proof the stabilizer ripped off. The video is too blurry to be definitive. But the control surfaces were at least frozen

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  • [–] 14 points 1 day ago* (5 children)

    there are pictures of it everywhere. still frames from the videos.

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  • [+] -10 points 1 day ago* (4 children)
  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Lear jets have a T-tail. It's not hiding under the engines or anything, it would be plainly visible if it were there.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

    You can barely see the left wing in that picture because there's so much blurring. I can't see how you can be so confident about it. Or why are people are so inclined to spread rumors about the root cause of an accident when that isn't their job.

    I'm just saying we should wait for the actual investigation before declaring we know what happened. But apparently that warrants a deletion?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Great. Who cares? You're not a family member or friend of the victims. You're not an investigator with the FAA or the NTSB. You can believe whatever you want to believe.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    Wings iced up and stopped creating lift so the plane fell from the sky.

    No mystery except why they flew so close to the storm.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 day ago*

    To expand on this a little: long before a wing stops working from ice, it becomes a different wing with different aerodynamic characteristics, like stall angle and critical mach number. This is of course just speculation at this point, but among informed professionals I've heard a lot of talk about a mach tuck, which is probably not recoverable, even without the possible loss of the horizontal stabilizer.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    You're making quite the assumption there. We don't know why they crashed. There are many possibilities. Icing may have diminished or removed control surface authority before a stall occurred, as an example of an alternate option

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  • [–] 19 points 1 day ago (5 children)

    I think it was intentional

    To what end? It crashed into a sidewalk, harming no one else. There are way easier ways to off yourself than a jet hitting the ground at 30000 fpm.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 day ago* (3 children)

    I mean it's happened before with SilkAir, GermanWings, and that Air China flight a couple years ago so let's not act like it's impossible. I seriously doubt it's the case here though, since we know they flew into a thunderstorm and we have the ATC audio.

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  • [–] 0 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

    The ATC tapes are proof enough you’re wrong. Sit down and shut up. Enough with this conspiracy stupidity.

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  • [–] 0 points 19 hours ago* (1 child)

    It wasn't conspiracy shit, asshat. The comment I replied to was acting like people commit murder-suicide attacks for logical reasons and such a thing couldn't possibly happen. I pointed out that they can and do happen. And I even mentioned the ATC audio in my comment.

    This whole thread is full of irrational morons who can't read. Why can't you just wait for the investigation before confidently declaring you know exactly what happened? I'm the only one here saying we don't know, y'all are the ones pretending to be experts and spreading pet theories about it.

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  • [–] 1 point 18 hours ago

    Then don’t talk out your ass suggesting the possibility it could be something other than it being a tragic accident and in the same breath say “wait for the investigation” while we have tapes that pretty much show it being a tragedy. The only irrationality here is offering any legitimacy to the conspiratards at all, fueled by the vacuum of hard info surrounding this event thanks to the fact that aircraft like this generally don’t have CVR/DFDR to tell us what happened with actual data.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago

    I think the only malfunction that could cause that angle and steep of a dive is if the controls got stuck

    An easy opinion to have when you know absolutely nothing about aviation. Welcome to the Dunning-Kruger club

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