Instructor Calls Learjet 60 Co-Pilot Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras, 20, Most Gifted Student in 40 Years of Teaching

Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras, the 20-year-old co-pilot who died when a Learjet 60 crashed in South Florida on November 1, has been remembered by her flight instructor, Chris Kirk, as the most naturally gifted pilot he has taught in 40 years of instructing. Nine people died in the crash. Kirk said he was one of her first instructors and mentors, and he shared a photograph of the two smiling in a cockpit.

Kirk said examiners were repeatedly impressed on her check rides. During her pilot-in-command training for the Learjet she had fewer than 1,100 flight hours, yet an examiner believed she had about 5,000 hours. He also said he gave her chances to fly other aircraft, including tailwheel planes and a Caravan.

Filgueiras's interest in aviation began when her father, Thiago, who learned to fly recreationally in 2018, took her on flights in his Beechcraft Bonanza. She began lessons in 2020 and earned her private pilot's license in October 2023 at age 17, while still a senior at West Boca Raton High School and before she held a driver's license. The School District of Palm Beach County's Aviation Academy, which launched its program in 2023, helped pay for her training. She later worked as a flight instructor in Fort Lauderdale before taking another pilot position.

The aircraft had departed Austin, Texas, bound for North Eleuthera in the Bahamas. The crew reported turbulence and icing before a rapid descent. Filgueiras made a Mayday call saying they were descending at 10,000 feet per minute, and the jet struck the ground and burst into flames. The FAA said the aircraft dived at about 350 feet per second before crashing onto a road.

Pilots who reach a light-jet cockpit in their early twenties usually do so through a chain of instructor endorsements, examiner check rides and school-funded training pathways, and this case shows each link of that chain. Public school-district aviation academies feeding students into professional flying is a newer element of that pipeline, and its first graduates are only now reaching turbine aircraft.

An instructor's tribute describes a person and a training record; it says nothing about why the aircraft descended as it did, and nothing about the conditions the crew faced. The turbulence and icing the crew reported, the descent rate quoted in the Mayday call and the FAA's figure for the dive are data points, not findings. Cause remains a matter for the investigation, and no determination has been announced.

The next substantive signal will come from the investigators: whatever factual material they release on the flight's final minutes will carry more weight than any account of the crew's background.