Learjet N722BD Crash on Military Trail: 3D Reconstruction

This dashcam caught Learjet N722 Bravo Delta hitting Military Trail in Palm Beach County on November 1st.

If you blinked, you missed it. The jet appears in just three frames, about a tenth of a second.

A dashcam records thirty frames a second, and its shutter is open for only about two-thousandths of a second each time.

For ninety-four percent of every second, it's blind.

At six hundred and forty miles an hour, the jet traveled thirty-one feet between frames.

So I rebuilt the impact in 3D. The speed, the sixty-five-degree dive, and the timing come from the flight tracking data.

The camera in a car about two hundred and twenty-five feet away was matched to the video. Then I rendered it at one thousand frames per second. That's thirty-three frames for every one the dashcam recorded.

Here's the real video slowed thirty-three times with the simulation laid over it.

The aluminum airframe was instantly pulverized, its thousands of pieces scattered like dust.

The jet hits the ground as fast as a pistol bullet.

Its entire fifty-eight-foot length goes into the pavement in one-sixteenth of a second. The tail is still flying at full speed while the nose is already gone.

It carried about three hundred and sixty megajoules of energy.

That's like five hundred and fifty cars hitting a wall at sixty miles an hour all at the same instant.

The airframe doesn't break into big pieces. It shreds.

In the simulation, fragments fly out at seventy-five to three hundred and twenty miles an hour. From the dashcam, one pixel covers about two inches. Many of these pieces are smaller than a pixel, and they cross up to sixteen feet between frames.

To a thirty-frame-per-second camera, they aren't pieces at all.

They're a smear or nothing. The NTSB says debris is spread across roughly half a mile and that there's some evidence the jet began breaking up before impact.

This reconstruction assumes it hit in one piece.

What the dashcam recorded as three blurry frames was the near instant total destruction of a nearly ten-ton jet. What it didn't show was the tragic death of the nine people on board.