All nine people aboard a Learjet 60 were killed on Sunday, November 1, when the business jet came down in a residential area of Palm Beach County, Florida, roughly four miles south of the West Palm Beach airport.
The aircraft had taken off from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in Texas and was bound for North Eleuthera Airport in the Bahamas. It crashed at about 12:50 p.m. local time near Cresthaven, along Military Trail between Cresthaven Boulevard and 10th Avenue North. Jim Reynolds, a spokesman for the Austin airport, identified the jet's tail number as N722BD.
A fireball beside a main road
The impact ignited a fireball next to homes and a major roadway, left a large crater in the pavement, and scattered fire and debris through a mobile home neighborhood. The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office closed Military Trail in both directions.
Whether anyone on the ground was hurt was not immediately clear; no deaths on the ground had been confirmed as of 4 p.m. Sunday. The identities of the nine people on board had not been released.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed the deaths in a post on X, calling the crash a "horrific tragedy."
A 27,000-foot drop in one minute
Flight-tracking data from ADS-B Exchange, cited by CNN, shows the jet descending about 27,000 feet in the space of a minute before the signal stopped. That is not a cause — it is a description of the final seconds, and the kind of rate that points investigators toward a sudden loss of control or a structural or system failure rather than a gradual emergency.
The National Transportation Safety Board is leading the investigation, with the Federal Aviation Administration supporting it; an FAA team was sent to the site. The FAA normally posts a preliminary accident report by the next business day, while the NTSB's own preliminary findings typically take several weeks and its final report a year or more.
The Learjet 60 is a mid-size business jet built by Bombardier from the early 1990s until 2012, certified for two crew and up to eight passengers.
Reporting from Fox 13 News and Newsweek.
