Mother of 20-Year-Old Florida Learjet Co-Pilot Says She Predicted Daughter’s Death in Cras

A private Learjet 60 was heading from Austin, Texas toward the Bahamas on Sunday afternoon when something went terribly wrong high above Florida. The plane dropped from the sky and slammed into a residential stretch near Greenacres in Palm Beach County just before 1 p.m., bursting into a fireball on impact. All nine people on board died.

Among them was 20-year-old co-pilot Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras. She had earned her pilot’s license while still in high school, even before she got a driver’s license, and she had already logged around 1,300 hours of flight time after roughly nine months working as a commercial pilot. Her mother, Camila Gadelha Corteleti, told reporters she always carried a quiet fear that her daughter’s lifelong dream of flying would one day take her away.

Nathalia grew up in a Brazilian family living in Florida and decided she wanted to become a pilot when she was about 12. She trained through the Aviation and Aerospace Academy at West Boca Raton High School, then finished her flight training at American Flyers in Pompano Beach. She later worked as a flight instructor before joining a private charter company. In an old local TV interview she laughed about people teasing her for not driving yet, saying she could fly instead.

Her sister Guilia described her as an amazing girl who was really brave and fought until the last moment she could. Camila called her responsible and hardworking, and she stressed that as co-pilot Nathalia was not the one making the final decisions on the flight. The pilot in command has been identified as 55-year-old Jeff Gregory.

In the minutes before the crash, the crew reported ice building up on the aircraft and moderate turbulence. Air traffic control recordings captured the situation turning critical fast. Someone in the cockpit declared a mayday as the plane began losing altitude at a shocking rate, first around 10,000 feet per minute and then accelerating to 20,000 feet per minute. The last desperate words included “We’re going to crash into the ground.”

Camila told the New York Post she knew her daughter’s dream would be the thing that took her away. “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,” she said. She added that if Nathalia could have chosen a way to go, this would have been it, though she never wanted it to happen so soon. In a separate interview with CNN Brasil she repeated that her daughter had been a very good girl.

Federal investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board are still piecing together what happened. Board member Tom Chapman said weather conditions, including the reported icing and turbulence, are a major focus. There is also early evidence that the Learjet may have started breaking apart before it hit the ground at high speed. The crash left a large crater near a mobile home area and debris scattered across the roadway. One person on the ground suffered a leg injury.

The other passengers included a Texas family of four, a nanny, and two family friends. Our thoughts are with everyone affected by this loss.