Sad story in this case. The cockpit audio was quite chilling.
But yes, that's a lot of kinetic mass dead-stopping on a hard surface and 1 to 2 kiloliters of jet fuel.
A lot of them are designed to explode before hitting the target for maximum damage.
At 30fps, I make that somewhere in the region of 1000mph.
1. The so-called coffin corner [1] where the minimum safe speed for aerodynamic lift and the speed where the plane will stall narrows to a dangerously narrow window. This is caused in part because the speed of sound decreases at high altitude. Turbulence can throw you out of this window; and
2. It seems likely that control was lost because of ice. In released ATC recordings (which are awful to listen to, be warned) the pilot mentions ice. This is likely because of the bad weather over south Florida right now.
The pilot requested a new flight path and I believe tried to ascend from 35,000 feet to 37,000 feet and ended up in a spiral, banked at ~60 degrees, descending at ~30,000 feet per minute, crashing into the ground.
I'm not a pilot but I suspect there will be some element of this that is pilot error or at least could've been avoided and/or mitigated by an experienced pilot.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_corner_(aerodynamics)
In the pictures, the flaps appear present but not extended. If they had been extended they would have ripped away at that speed. And they would not have been able to lower them after the overspeed began. I think the answer is in the control system. One or more control surfaces were doing something other than commanded.
Some images seem to indicate a loss/absence of the horizontal stabilizer, but it is hard to tell AI from real these days.
https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/674728-lear-60-...
No pilot can fly a plane thats inside a truly violent thunderstorm. Flight control surfaces tend to snap off and in some cases the aircraft disintegrates in air. Some video suggests flight control surfaces broke off in flight here, which if accurate would explain the uncontrolled impact with the ground. The Lear Jet is a slick aircraft but one that has little margin for error.
christophilus•32m ago
kzrdude•27m ago
embedding-shape•24m ago
If there is, seems they're deep under the ground as it nosedove straight into the ground and essentially disappeared, the crater showed almost no debris at all. People been guessing on reddit that everything just got "instantly pulverized" which I doubt somewhat, the shape of the frame is perfect for it shooting into the ground so I'm guessing they'll spend some weeks digging and eventually find the wreck.
Edit: Since I can't respond to my children:
> This kind of impact in fact has tendency to turn aircraft into powder
How often? A similar crash that comes to mind is https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/06/05/dc-... where they did recover actual bodies, even if the impact was near-vertical and seemingly faster than this case.
What specific cases are you thinking about where everything "instantly pulverized"?
p_l•18m ago
DoneWithAllThat•10m ago
kzrdude•3m ago
giarc•24m ago
nradov•21m ago
p_l•20m ago
shadowgovt•6m ago
Xenoamorphous•4m ago