Family of four, two close friends and nanny also died in crash as pilot identified as 55-year-old Jeff Gregory
Nathalia Filgueiras, 20, was co-pilot of the private Learjet 60 en route from Austin-Bergstrom international airport in Texas to North Eleuthera airport in the Bahamas on Sunday when it suddenly plummeted out of the sky, killing all onboard, her mother told the New York Times.
Later on Monday, the family of the passengers who died posted a statement on Facebook identifying the victims and paying tribute to them.
It named them as Adam Robinson, 45, a Texas-based technology entrepreneur; his wife Helen Sharp, 40; and their children, Emma, four, and Charlie, two. The statement said close family friends Rachael Reed and Charmi Fehr were also killed, along with Anita Maria Cetina, the children’s nanny.
The pilot in charge of the Learjet was identified by TMZ and other media outlets on Monday as Jeff Gregory, 55, an experienced aviator from Pennsylvania.
Private/business jets should be outlawed, on top of the ecological cost most crashes are small planes like this. And people will say “oh but they’re safer than cars”, but nobody needs a fucking jet to get places. The consequences of it failing are just too high.
It almost hit mar a lago. I say we keep allowing them until we get a bullseye.
Hopefully its Elmos jet that goes down next!
I wish they would all switch to submarines
Or perhaps low flying, thin skinned dirigibles
You’re a bit confused on the stats
The planes that have the most accidents are general aviation (GA) planes, not chartered private jets like this
GA is the actual small planes. 2-4 seaters usually. It’s also the least experiences pilots, usually pilots building hours to be in the airlines or charters
Charters follow a lot, but not all, of the same safety regulations as commercial airlines. They do still have more accidents, for a variety of reasons
Charter companies play an important role in the pilot pipeline. Many commercial pilots work at charters while they build hours to get their ATP to be able to work at a commercial airline
If they couldn’t work at a charter, they would have to instead fly in circles to build hours. A suboptmial outcome
Mile per mile, cars are more deadly. If the concern is safety, you’d have to start there
Cars are only deadly because any idiot and his dog can get a licence. If car drivers had to go through as much training and rigorous standards as pilots, cars would be safer, since they can’t fall out of the sky.
Cars also have much tighter tolerances than planes. A 1 second lapse on the highway could easily cause a multi-car collision.
Planes have this during takeoff and landing. But once they are in the air, maintain a much larger distance between themselves and any hazard. When something goes wrong, pilots have a long time to fix it.
So apparently the rates of crashes in general aviation are set off by drunk pilots in Alaska specifically. If you exclude alcohol-related crashes in Alaska, general aviation starts to look a lot safer.
Can we exclude drunk drivers from California (since it’s the biggest offender) and call cars safer then? We can’t remove inconvenient data and people don’t just drink and fly in one state.
Alaskan aviation is very different from the rest of the country
They literally are not even flying with the same rules and regulations
It’s still far safer than driving, but Alaskan aviation is not as safe as the rest of the country, and should be separated out due to the different rules
I mean, for me personally it made me feel a lot safer getting my pilot’s license because I don’t drink alcohol, so there’s very little chance I’ll ever fly drunk.
Planes have a max gross takeoff weight that much be followed at all times, unless you’re in Alaska
Alaskan pilots kept crashing because they skipped fuel to fit in another passenger so often the FAA said it was better for them to fly overweight than with absolute minimum fuel
There are a handful of regulations with an “except in Alaska” carveout
Interesting, definitely impacts the statistics
Aircrafts Georg is an outlier adn should not have been counted.
Maybe they should be outlawed for environmental reasons, but private jets operated by professional service providers as in this case aren’t the “small planes” with the high crash rates. It’s the ones with piston engines and inexperienced owner-pilots that crash a lot.
Even those are roughly comparable to cars in terms of injury and death rates for a comparable trip. Driving is one of the most dangerous things the average person does, so that’s not exactly good, but it seems to be within most peoples’ risk tolerance.
As opposed to cars, which have famously few consequences when things go wrong.
As much as I’d love to see them made illegal, I don’t remember the last time I saw an SUV or oversized pickup truck make a 20 foot crater.
True and fair. But, on the flip side, I don’t remember the last time I saw a private jet plow through a crowd of protestors. So, like, there are trade-offs I guess.
I think I’m getting th gist of the conversation, transportation can be dangeous. Did I sum that up well?
Tesla: hold my beer
I remember sometime back that some rich bloke was talking about cutting cost for maintenance in airliners. Part of me wants to say that somebody got the message and started cutting corners for private jets first.