Father of 20-year-old co-pilot killed in Florida Learjet crash says her final radio calls showed composure under extreme duress

Allan Filgueiras, a pilot who helped teach his daughter Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras to fly, spoke at a news conference on Friday, often holding back tears. His daughter, 20, was the co-pilot of a Learjet that crashed in Florida the previous Sunday, killing nine people. He said he has repeatedly listened to her final radio transmissions, finds pride in how she handled the emergency, and that she kept fighting until the last moment.

In the recordings, Nathalia Filgueiras first calmly tells air traffic control about ice buildup as the plane flies into a thunderstorm. Turbulence tossed the aircraft up and down by about 700 feet (200 meters). The situation then escalated and the jet descended at about 20,000 feet per minute in an overspeed condition. The captain, 55-year-old Jeff Gregory, is believed to have been at the controls. Her father and aviation safety experts have praised her composure as she called out updates.

The family has pushed back on online criticism questioning whether she had enough experience for the cockpit of a high-performance business jet. She had more than 1,300 flight hours and completed extensive training to earn her commercial pilot's license and Learjet certification. Her father's attorney, Stuart Grossman, said she was at the top of her class and fully qualified to serve as co-pilot, and that there were no immediate plans for a lawsuit. Her mentor and instructor, Chris Kirk, said the examiner at her Learjet 60 check ride in March was so impressed that he believed she had more than her logged experience.

The Learjet accelerated beyond its design limits as it fell, and pieces of its tail were found miles from the crash site, a deep crater on the edge of a road. Investigators were still searching the area on Friday after finding part of an engine a day earlier. The National Transportation Safety Board has not determined the cause.

The other victims were technology entrepreneur Adam Robinson; his wife, Helen Sharp; their two young children; the family's nanny, Ana María Ramírez Cetina; and Rachael Reed and Charmi Fehr, who owned the Arca Boutique Hotel in Honduras.

The public debate over the co-pilot's age and hours illustrates a pattern common after fatal business-jet accidents: questions about crew experience surface within days, while the formal investigation is still collecting wreckage. For charter and corporate operators, crew pairing and qualification records become part of the reputational picture even when no finding links them to the outcome.

The flight data described so far points investigators toward the weather encounter and the aircraft's behaviour in it: icing, turbulence of about 700 feet, an overspeed descent and structural separation of tail pieces. Separating weather, aircraft response and crew actions is the work of the NTSB, and attributing the outcome to any one of them before that work is done would be speculation.

What settles the open questions is the NTSB's analysis of the recovered wreckage, including the engine part found on Thursday and the tail pieces located miles away, together with the cockpit audio and air traffic control recordings. Until the board states a cause, statements from the family, their attorney and her instructor describe her qualifications and conduct but do not establish why the aircraft was lost.