One of the pilots of the Learjet 60 that crashed in a residential area in Florida, killing all nine people on board, was a 20-year-old named Nathalia Filgueiras, her mother told The New York Times.
Filgueiras had logged more than 1,300 hours of flight time and got her pilot’s license at 17, Camila Corteleti told the Times.
The 20-year-old worked for Upper Jets, a private charter firm based in Fort Lauderdale, her mother said.
The jet’s other pilot has not yet been identified. It’s not known which pilot was flying the plane when it started descending.
Her pilot’s license showed she had the rating to fly that model of Learjet but not to be in command of the flight, The Associated Press reported.
Her mother told CNN Brasil that her daughter was the co-pilot.
“She was a very good girl – responsible, hardworking,” Corteleti said. “She was the co-pilot and couldn’t make any decisions.”
Authorities have not yet publicly identified the victims of the crash.
The Bahamas-bound aircraft fell from the sky before hitting the ground and exploding in a residential area of Greenacres, about 7 miles southwest of West Palm Beach.
A federal investigator said Monday that parts of the business jet appear to have broken off before the aircraft crashed in South Florida and erupted into a ball of flames.
“It was a cataclysmic plane crash,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said. “It looked like a missile going down.”
“We do have some indication that the aircraft was breaking up before impact,” National Transportation Safety Board member Tom Chapman said at a news conference Monday. “We may find parts of the aircraft some distance away from the actual impact site.”
Filgueiras started flying during high school and earned her private pilot’s license in 2023, when she was just 17 years old and a senior at West Boca Raton Community High School, CBS 12 in Florida reported that year. In addition to attending ground school, she learned firsthand from her father, who started flying for fun in 2018.
The outlet wrote that Filgueiras’ “ultimate dream” was to become a commercial airline pilot or pilot jets.
Her mother said she’d announced she wanted to be a pilot when she was 12.
“She loved the freedom,” Corteleti told the Times. “It was completely different seeing the world from the top.”