Our timeline couldn’t possibly get any weirder. This wild and tragic crash story has only just entered its dramatic hot takes period, so today we’ll cover the basics while waiting for more reliable information to bubble up from the La Brea Tar Pits of X. Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “Desperate Mayday as Small Plane Plummets to Ground in Florida, Killing 9.” Nearly a full day later, despite massive media focus, the nine victims remain unidentified. There is probably a good reason, but that was just the first oddity in this bizarre story.
Yesterday —just days after mobile anti-aircraft missile systems were installed all around the Southern Residence— a Learjet 60 dove straight into the ground at top speed next to a trailer park in Palm Beach, Florida. It disappeared into a fiery crater eight miles from Mar-a-Lago.
Consciously or not, Governor DeSantis said what everyone was thinking when he described the scene as, “it looked like a missile going down.” The crash was captured —in full— from only about a block away on someone’s Tesla’s rear-facing camera (promptly triggering claims it was AI/SI created. Welcome to the age of no video is good enough.)
Thankfully, and miraculously, there were no casualties on the ground, even though there seem to have been plenty of folks around.
Obviously, just the crash’s proximity to the Residence was enough to put an anxious public on high alert. But there’s more. Trump was home at the time; he’d just left 50 minutes prior, heading for a Kansas rally. All of that air-defense hardware had just arrived. And the plane had just changed directions to avoid bad weather, which put it on a collision course with the FAA’s no-fly zone around Mar-a-Lago (though there is some debate over whether the NOTAM restriction had ended minutes before the plane would have entered).
On social media, people were busily analyzing the crash video frame-by-frame and questioning everything imaginable. They’ve offered many fascinating theories, but remember: the truth always takes time.
A few facts trickled out. The FAA said nine people had been on board, including two pilots. The tail number was identified and traced to an ambiguous LLC, which several networks described as a charter service. The plane was en route from Austin, Texas to Eleuthera, Bahamas. A gruesome radio call between the terrified female pilot and the ground suggested she’d lost all control and crashed in seconds. (Warning: The audio is one of those things that sears your brain on both sides. Consider not listening if it scrolls across your feed.)
By this morning, unofficial but widespread claims had identified one of the pilots as a winsome young Floridian who was in the news in 2023 for getting her pilot’s license in high school. She was in high school in 2023— so she was an extremely young airwoman. If it was her, her usual co-pilot has been described in unrelated articles as her boyfriend, and some say a male voice can be heard in the background reciting the Lord’s Prayer. None of this is confirmed.
Flying enthusiasts who analyzed the radio intercept first seemed to have widely concluded the crash was caused by ice building up on the wings due to inclement weather. MyRadar reported a thunderstorm top shooting from about 33,000 to 48,300 feet in 25 minutes, right under the jet.
Supporting the “ice” theory, at 35,000 ft, the male pilot can be heard telling Miami Center, “We have light, clear ice that is manageable and moderate turbulence.” He reported an outside temperature of −47°C and asked to climb to 37,000. Moments later he declared a mayday: “overspeed condition descending 20,000 feet per minute.” ABC, citing the FAA, said the jet dropped from 35,250 to 8,750 ft in just over a minute.
The last lines Fox 13 reported were of the female pilot: “We’re gonna crash into the ground!”, “banking 60 degrees!” and a horrifying finale: screaming and then only, “Look outside!”
That’s a ride nobody wants to go on. It is painful to even try imagining what it must have been like. (Don’t try.)
🛩️ But the ice explanation was ultimately unsatisfying. Minus 47°C sounds cold, all right, but at that temperature there’s little liquid water to freeze on the wings, and the male pilot had just called the ice “manageable.” So other experts began pointing to weather ambiguity: storm turbulence, an upset and overspeed, or maybe ice crystals affecting the engines. (This puzzle is not particularly strange; it hasn’t even been a day, so nobody should expect a cause to be determined yet.)
Commenters highlighted other weird, as-yet unresolved facts. Why did the missile-like Learjet crash without bringing down all the nearby power cables clearly visible in the video? In other words, where were its wings? No obvious wreckage is visible in any of the photos. Others pointed out the fact that, since 1992, no Learjet 60 has ever crashed during flight (as opposed to during takeoffs and landings), and never from ice accumulation.
Two groups of theories are boiling in the conspiracy community. The first group suggests the plane was an attack on the President involving hackers and remote control takeovers. The second group thinks that the plane, perhaps trying to avoid bad weather, might have accidentally triggered freshly activated space-based air defenses that zapped its control system before it could reach the air over the Residence. Expect these theories to evolve as more tangible information emerges.
The NTSB will hold its first briefing later today. Until then, the only real answer is the least satisfying one: we don’t know yet. Expect updates tomorrow.
