GREENACRES, Fla. — A piece of the private jet that crashed in south Florida over the weekend was found miles from the crash site.
Officials said a portion of the left tail elevator was found in three pieces, one of which was four miles from the crash site, The New York Times reported.
The part controls the plane’s angle, which National Transportation Safety Board member Thomas Chapman called a “very important piece of evidence.”
It is not known if it broke off before the plane started falling or after.
“What that means exactly, in terms of what caused the aircraft to lose control, or whether the loss of this piece was a result of the forces on the aircraft, we don’t know yet,” Chapman said, according to The Associated Press.
Most of the plane’s wreckage was in a crater, but investigators could not access it until public works teams cleared water and other damage caused by the crash.
The plane’s cockpit voice recorder has not been recovered. The plane had been outfitted with one, but it is unknown whether it was on the aircraft at the time.
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All nine people on board the Learjet died. They include tech executive Adam Robinson, his wife Helen Sharp, their two children and the family’s nanny, as well as the plane’s pilot, Jeff Gregory, and co-pilot, Nathalia Filgueiras. Rachael Reed, Charmi Fehr and Anita Maria Cetina were also on board and killed, CNN reported.
Initially, officials said there were no deaths or injuries on the ground, but one person did suffer a leg injury, the NTSB later said, according to CNN.
The plane was en route from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas when it plunged, eventually falling as fast as 22,000 feet a minute, the Times said.
Speaking about the tail elevator, Chapman said: “At those speeds I don’t know that it would’ve been effective even if it had still been attached to the aircraft, but knowing that it was lost is a very important piece of evidence in terms of pointing us toward other things to investigate,” Chapman said.
A preliminary NTSB report on the crash is expected in about a month, with a final one possibly taking more than a year, the AP said.
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