GREENACRES, Fla. The family of a 20-year-old co-pilot from Boca Raton has identified her as one of the nine people killed when a Learjet 60 fell out of a storm and exploded on a Palm Beach County roadway Sunday afternoon. Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras earned her private pilot’s license at 17, before she ever held a driver’s license. Her mother and stepfather confirmed her identity and her seat in the cockpit to multiple outlets on Monday, starting with an exclusive interview with the New York Post.
Filgueiras had logged more than 1,300 hours of flight time and had spent roughly nine months flying for Upper Jets, a private charter company based in Fort Lauderdale, according to her family. She would have turned 21 in January. Born in the United States into a Brazilian family, she was the middle of three sisters, and her father, a recreational pilot who learned to fly for fun in 2018, first took her up as a child in his small Beechcraft Bonanza. Local 10 News reports her father separately confirmed her identity to the station on Monday.
“I wanted her to live her dream, but I knew that her dream was going to be the thing that would take her away from me,” her mother, Camila Corteleti, told the Post from the family’s home in Palm Beach County. “I knew that a plane was gonna take her away from me. I always knew it but I was so proud of her. I know she was living her dream.” The family also told CNN Brasil that Nathalia was the co-pilot on the flight, not the captain, so the final decisions in the cockpit were never hers to make.
Her last minutes are already part of the record. Filgueiras texted her boyfriend, Justin, at about 12:40 in the afternoon, her stepfather, Thiago Corteleti, told the Post. The message said the same thing the crew was telling air traffic controllers at that moment: “I’ve got turbulence, I’ve got ice.” The jet hit the ground ten minutes later.
The 2004 Bombardier Learjet 60, registered as N722BD to LR60271 LLC of Wilmington, Delaware, according to the Federal Aviation Administration’s public registry, had left Austin-Bergstrom International Airport that morning bound for North Eleuthera Airport in the Bahamas. It came down at about 12:50 in the afternoon near South Military Trail and 10th Avenue North, between Greenacres and the Cresthaven community, gouging a crater into the asphalt and erupting into a fireball. Dashcam video from a driver on the ground shows the jet in a near-vertical dive seconds before impact.
Flight-tracking data and the control tower recordings sketch the sequence. The crew was cruising near 35,000 feet when they reported moderate turbulence and light, manageable ice, then asked to climb to 37,000 feet as precipitation built around them. A mayday call followed about 20 seconds later, according to an analysis by MyRadar senior meteorologist Matthew Cappucci. The jet then descended at 10,000 feet per minute, then 20,000, with tracking data showing a peak above 32,000 feet per minute before the final signal at 8,750 feet. The fall lasted about a minute.
“Mayday, mayday, we’re descending 10,000 feet per minute,” a female voice the family identified as Filgueiras tells Miami controllers. “We are in an overspeed condition, descending 20,000 feet per minute. We’re going to crash into the ground.” A controller answers, “I’m here with you, talk to me.” In the final seconds, a male voice that the paper reports appears to be the captain recites the opening of the Lord’s Prayer while Filgueiras screams that the jet is descending through 22,000 feet banked hard to one side. The last transmission ends with the words “we’re out of time.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said all nine people aboard had died.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, walking the scene beside the crater, told reporters the jet had looked “like a missile going down” and left “a big crater on the side of the road.” No ground injuries were reported. The jet had come down at the entrance to a mobile home community, and about 600 residents were forced from their homes while investigators worked, with roughly three dozen spending that night at the Greenacres Community Center shelter.
“We’re waiting for someone to give us answers about what we’re going to do, because they’re not even letting us into the community to get our clothes,” evacuee Jesus Solorzano told WPTV. He was not alone. Palm Beach County Commissioner Joel Flores called the site a crime scene and warned, in remarks WSVN carried , that displaced families would have shelter for the night and that Military Trail could stay closed for weeks.
The weather over Palm Beach County that afternoon was violent even by South Florida standards. A stalled frontal boundary had parked over the area, and Cappucci’s analysis says a storm cell rocketed cloud tops upward by 15,000 feet in roughly 20 minutes, the kind of rapid growth that can freeze moisture onto a jet’s surfaces almost instantly. Robert Sumwalt, a former NTSB chairman who now serves as a CBS News safety analyst, explained that ice both adds weight and disrupts the smooth flow of air over the wings. None of this settles the cause. Investigators have not said why the jet went down.
Early attention has fallen on ice and on the jet’s tail, the section that controls whether the nose points up or down in flight. A Miami Herald interview with a Florida aviation attorney who reviewed the recordings noted the descent covered about seven miles in roughly a minute and said a frozen horizontal stabilizer, the small wing that controls pitch on the tail, could produce exactly this kind of plunge, adding that “there was no gliding here.” Some aviation commentators reviewing the dashcam footage have also questioned whether pieces of the tail were already missing in the final frames, though nothing has been confirmed. The NTSB has endorsed no theory.
The crash also became a misinformation magnet. Rumors spread on X that rocker Lenny Kravitz had been aboard, a false claim his team slapped down in a statement to the Post after a post by a different Florida pilot, Emily Shelton, about flying Kravitz on a similar Austin-to-Eleuthera route got attached to the wrong jet. Kravitz was never on the flight.
Filgueiras represented a pipeline South Florida has invested in. Her early training was funded through the Palm Beach County School District’s Aviation Academy, and she later trained at American Flyers while working toward an airline career. Hypefresh previously covered 17-year-old Kamora Freeland becoming the youngest Black female licensed pilot in United States history, Some coverage of Sunday’s crash has framed Filgueiras’s age as a question mark, though an Associated Press report noted her pilot’s license showed she held the rating to fly that Learjet model, just not to serve as its pilot in command.
She was locally famous before the crash. In October 2023, CBS12 profiled the West Boca Raton High senior who had picked up her private license the month before, driver’s license still pending, with 88 hours in her logbook and lessons that began in 2020. “I definitely do brag because people say, ‘oh you can’t drive,’ and I’m like, ‘yeah but I can fly,'” she told the station then, adding that she liked being different. Flying came first. The station republished the profile Monday with an editor’s note confirming she was the co-pilot who died.
Small-aircraft tragedies have landed close to home for readers before. Hypefresh covered songwriter Brett James reportedly dying in a plane crash, and separately the San Diego crash that killed former Devil Wears Prada drummer Daniel Williams. Survivors carry the weight differently, and Travis Barker has explained why he still crosses the Atlantic by boat after surviving his own 2008 plane crash. The Greenacres intersection now joins that list, cordoned off and guarded while the answers take shape.
The NTSB launched a go-team within hours and Member Tom Chapman was scheduled to brief reporters Monday afternoon at the Palm Beach County Emergency Operations Center in West Palm Beach. The federal calendar is slow. An explainer on how the federal process works notes a factual preliminary report typically arrives within about 30 days, with the final probable-cause finding taking 12 to 24 months. Authorities have not publicly named the other eight people aboard, including the captain, and by Monday morning the Palm Beach County Medical Examiner had not released official identifications.
Corteleti told the Post she had always known a plane might take her daughter from her. She was proud anyway. Now a displaced neighborhood and a mourning family are waiting on the same federal investigators. Written answers are weeks away.
