JACKSONVILLE, Fla. \u2013 An aviation expert says ice may have brought down a Learjet that crashed on Nov. 1, killing all nine people on board.<\/p>\n
News4JAX spoke one-on-one with Edward Booth, a board-certified aviation attorney and airline transport-rated pilot with 49 years of aviation experience. Booth said he instantly looked at weather conditions after hearing about the crash.<\/p>\n
\u201cI immediately looked at the weather prevailing at the time and thought initially that it must\u2019ve been caused by some weather phenomena that the aircraft encountered,\u201d Booth said. \u201cWhen I heard that they were reporting clear icing, visible precipitation and an outside temp of minus 50 Fahrenheit, I think it becomes clear that this was a situation where the tail of the airplane became contaminated by ice and rendered it uncontrollable.\u201d<\/p>\n
How ice can bring down a plane<\/p>\n
Booth explained that each aircraft has a maximum airspeed based on its structural limits. When ice builds up on the tail of a plane, it can cause the tail to become inoperative or stall. At that point, the nose pitches downward \u2014 and there is nothing a pilot can do to pull it back up. Once the plane exceeds that maximum speed, Booth said, nothing can be done.<\/p>\n
What we know about the flight<\/p>\n
The chartered Learjet was approximately 20 years old. The co-pilot has been identified, but the captain has not yet been identified, according to reports. Nine people were killed in the crash.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 by WJXT News4JAX – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"JACKSONVILLE, Fla. \u2013 An aviation expert says ice may have brought down a Learjet that crashed on Nov.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":445759,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[116,118,117],"class_list":["post-445758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville-headlines","tag-jacksonville-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445758\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/445759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}