Learjet Crash in Palm Beach County Kills All 9 Aboard; Jet Nose-Dived Into a Greenacres Neighborhood

A business jet carrying nine people nose-dived into a South Florida neighborhood on Sunday and erupted into a giant fireball that appeared to just miss homes before crashing near a busy roadway, the Associated Press reported. All nine people aboard were killed, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said, in a post on X calling the crash a “horrific tragedy.” The Learjet 60 went down at 12:50 p.m. near Military Trail and 10th Avenue North in the Greenacres area of Palm Beach County, according to the AP and the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office.

The jet had departed Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in Texas and was headed to the Bahamas, the Federal Aviation Administration said; CNN reported its destination as North Eleuthera Airport. An Austin airport spokesperson, Jim Reynolds, said it was a private aircraft and gave the tail number as N722BD, the AP reported. The Sheriff's Office closed Military Trail in both directions — CNN placed the site between Cresthaven Boulevard and 10th Avenue North — and urged motorists to avoid the area. There were no reports of anyone on the ground being killed, Gov. Ron DeSantis said, though the crash left a significant debris field. About 600 people needed shelter because of the damage on the ground, said Palm Beach County Commissioner Joel Flores, the first county official at the scene, and residents were being sent to two shelters in the county, CNN reported.

Minutes before the crash, the pilot reported ice accumulating on the aircraft, an outside air temperature of minus 47 degrees Celsius and moderate turbulence bouncing the plane by up to 700 feet, according to air traffic control recordings captured by LiveATC.net and reported by CNN. After reporting that precipitation had started and asking to climb, the crew declared an emergency: “We're descending 8,000 – mayday, mayday – we're descending 10,000 feet per minute,” the pilot radioed, in CNN's account of the recording. “We are in an overspeed condition descending 20,000 feet per minute … We're going to crash into the ground.” The jet descended 27,000 feet in one minute before flight-tracking data cut off, the website ADS-B Exchange shows, CNN reported. “It looked like a missile going down,” DeSantis said.

The crash is the second deadliest in the United States this year, according to National Transportation Safety Board records cited by CNN, after June's skydiving plane crash in Butler, Missouri, which killed 12. The FAA and the NTSB will investigate, with NTSB investigators arriving at the site Sunday and Monday, CNN reported. There were scattered storms in the area at the time and the jet passed through a stronger storm cell minutes before it began descending; whether the weather contributed is not yet known, and no cause has been determined. The names of the nine people aboard had not been released in the reports the desk read this run.