Learjet 60 Crash: Voice Recorder Mystery and Tail Failure Investigation

The engine section they dug out of the flooded crater on Thursday, and the elevator pieces will go to a secure facility where metallurgists will study the fracture surfaces.

Overload failure looks different under a microscope from fatigue, and fatigue looks different from a part that was already compromised before the flight began.

That examination will take months. Until then, the single most important question in this investigation, whether the tail failed first or failed last, is open, and the one device that could close it is the subject of its own mystery.

Under Part 135, the federal rules for charter flying a multi-engine turbine airplane with six or more passenger seats that needs two pilots is required to carry a cockpit voice recorder.

The Learjet 60 needs two pilots. The maintenance records for this airplane say a voice recorder was installed, and yet on Monday, Chapman stood in front of the cameras and said something that should never need to be said about a legally operated charter jet.

"We do not know," he said, "whether that recorder was still on board.

Sometimes these things change over time."

Think about what that sentence means. The lead investigator could not say 48 hours after a fatal accident whether a federally required piece of safety equipment was present on the airplane, not whether it survived, whether it was there.

The NTSB has recorder specialists on site.

They spent most of the week pumping rainwater out of a crater that filled during the same storms that brought the airplane down.

By Thursday, they had found part of an engine.

As of the latest update, they have not announced finding the recorder.

The agency held its second and final on-scene briefing on Tuesday and has gone quiet since, which is normal procedure, but it means the public may not learn whether the box existed until the preliminary report roughly a month out.

There's a precedent for this, and it is not reassuring.

In January of last year, a Learjet 55 air ambulance crashed into a Philadelphia neighborhood seconds after takeoff and killed seven people.

That airplane had a cockpit voice recorder.

Investigators recovered it. When they opened it, it held no sound from the final flight.

It had, they concluded, probably not worked for years.

Nobody had noticed. Nobody had checked. The box was on the airplane, the paperwork was in order, and it was recording nothing.

So there are three possibilities for November, 722 Bravo Delta.

The recorder was aboard and working and is somewhere in that crater and will give the NTSB three minutes of audio between the ice report and the end, or it was aboard and, like Philadelphia, was a dead box that satisfied an inspection and nothing else.

Or it was removed at some point in the airplane's 22 years and never put back, which would mean this jet had been carrying paying passengers in violation of the rules it was certified under, and the NTSB would have to explain how that was allowed to happen.

The voice recorder would settle the tail question.

It would capture the stall warning, the overspeed clacker, the sound of a structure letting go, and the exact words between a 55-year-old captain and a 20-year-old first officer as the airplane departed controlled flight. Without it,

the investigators are rebuilding the final 30 seconds from radar returns, a dash cam, a flooded hole in the road, and a radio call made by someone watching the altimeter unwind.

Let us talk about that radio call and the person making it because the internet already has.

Nathalia Gadelha Villegas was 20. She held a commercial pilot certificate and a type rating in the Learjet 60 that let her fly it as second-in-command but not as captain.

By her mother's account, she had logged more than 1,300 hours.

She got her private license at 17 through a Palm Beach County School District aviation academy, and she worked for Upper Jets, the operator of the flight.

Her father, Alan, is a pilot and helped teach her to fly.

He says they flew together to Key West and Naples.

Within a day of the crash, social media had decided that a 20-year-old woman in the right seat of a jet was the explanation.

Within five days, her father was sitting at a news conference in Coral Gables beside a prominent aviation attorney named Stuart Grossman, who said out loud that the purpose of the event was to preserve not just her memory,

but her reputation. He said she was perfectly qualified to be the co-pilot on this flight, despite her tender years.

He said there were no immediate plans for a lawsuit.

He did not say there would never be one.

That is a family that hired a lawyer before the preliminary report exists because they can see which way the wind is blowing.

And on the law, Grossman is right. Part 135 requires the captain of a passenger-carrying jet to hold an airline transport pilot certificate.

The second-in-command needs only a commercial certificate with an instrument rating.

She cleared the bar. The examiner who gave her Learjet 60 check ride in March reportedly came away thinking she had 5,000 hours, not 1,300.

John Cox, who started flying professionally at 19 himself, said she had done well to earn that seat.

There is a wrinkle. In March, she posted a photo of herself inside a Learjet 60 with a caption referring to herself as pilot-in-command.

Early reports from family members said she was at the controls when the jet went down.

Later reporting and the NTSB's own framing puts the captain on the controls.

Which of them was flying matters less than people think because in a two-crew jet, both pilots own the decision to fly toward that cell, but it matters enormously to the lawyers, and it will matter to the final report.

Jeff Gregory, the captain, is a harder person to see clearly because almost nothing has been said about his flying.

He was 55 from Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania.

He held an airline transport pilot certificate and a flight instructor certificate.

His former employer, East Coast Jets of Allentown, confirmed his death and noted that he worked there briefly in 2016 and 2017 before pursuing other opportunities.

That is nearly the entire public record of his career.

Friends describe a devout, diligent, dependable man who wanted to fly since childhood.

The director of operations at Upper Jets, Thomas Notzal, who is also his colleague and friend, set up a fundraiser for his wife and children.

A British tabloid has claimed he can be heard reciting the Lord's Prayer on the recording.

Nobody who has actually listened to the public air traffic audio has confirmed that, and I would treat it as what it is, which is a story someone wanted to be true.

What nobody has published is Gregory's total flight time, his hours in the Learjet 60, his time with Upper Jets, his recent training record, or his duty schedule in the days before the flight.

The NTSB has all of that. The co-pilot's lawyer has pointedly said nothing against him, and here is where the recorder question comes back around.

If it was working, we will hear two people managing a crisis together.

If it was not, the final report will lean on whatever the tracking data can say about who did what to the controls, and one of those two people has a lawyer while the other has a fundraiser.