Federal investigators have recovered the cockpit voice recorder from the Learjet 60 that crashed beside Military Trail in Palm Beach County on November 1, killing all nine people on board, the National Transportation Safety Board said on Monday, November 9 — the breakthrough investigators had been waiting for since it emerged last week that they could not even confirm a recorder was on the aircraft.

This is a new development in a story Awaaz Punjab has followed since the crash: our earlier reports covered the November 1 crash itself and the NTSB's confirmation that the jet had begun breaking apart before it hit the ground, with pieces of its left tail elevator found between 1.3 and 3.8 miles from the crater. The recorder was found at the site where the Bahamas-bound jet first hit the ground, the NTSB said in a statement posted to social media, and it is now being evaluated at the board's Vehicle Recorders Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

Source: National Transportation Safety Board statement, via Associated Press

What the recorder could tell investigators

If the audio can be recovered, it could provide crucial details about what the pilots said to each other as they encountered turbulence, as ice formed on the wings and as they lost control of the aircraft, the Associated Press reported. It was not immediately known whether the recorder had been damaged or whether it had been working at the time of the crash. From photographs the agency posted online, showing the recorder's orange-painted metal shell, it appeared to be in decent shape, aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti told the AP.

"It's very plausible that any info on the recorder survived," Guzzetti said. "If they can recover it, and it's from the accident flight, that will be a huge help to investigators." He also sounded the caution investigators know well: when the NTSB recovered the cockpit voice recorder from a medical transport plane that crashed in Philadelphia in January 2025, killing seven people, the device turned out likely not to have been functioning for several years.

Witnesses captured video as the business jet plunged nose-first into the ground, and air traffic control transmissions recorded the moments as the pilots realised their situation. But the cockpit recorder could shed light on what the microphones in the cockpit alone heard, including why the Learjet appeared to steer around a large storm cell only to head directly into a rapidly developing smaller one.

The crash, as investigators have pieced it together

The Learjet 60, registration N722BD, was a paid charter operated by Aurora Aviation, doing business as Upper Jets. It departed Austin, Texas, at about 10:37 a.m. on Sunday, November 1, bound for North Eleuthera in the Bahamas, carrying two crew members and seven passengers. Over Palm Beach County the crew reported ice and moderate turbulence and asked to climb; less than 30 seconds after the request, the jet began to descend. The co-pilot told controllers the plane was being thrown up and down more than 700 feet, and she asked for a better route through the weather, before a mayday call and transmissions that became unintelligible. The jet came down beside South Military Trail, between Cresthaven Boulevard and 10th Avenue North near Greenacres, about nine miles from Mar-a-Lago, gouging a large crater close to homes; the NTSB has said the location's closeness to the resort was purely coincidental.

With the recorder found, the on-scene phase is now over. The NTSB said excavation at the crash site is finished, and the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office said on Monday that it had completed its on-site investigation and demobilised from the South Military Trail scene, with the Florida Department of Transportation to begin repairing the roadway. Residents of the nearby mobile home park who were displaced can return home. Military Trail itself remained closed between 10th Avenue North and Cresthaven Boulevard as the road work begins.

The investigation from here

Investigators will review the jet's maintenance records and any history of problems with the plane. They will also interview officials at Upper Jets, the company that operated the flight, as well as air traffic controllers and people who work at the airport in Austin, from where the plane departed. The board's roughly 400 workers are pursuing more than 1,200 active investigations. The NTSB has not determined a probable cause for the crash, and investigators have been clear about the central unanswered question raised by the tail pieces: whether losing the elevator caused the loss of control, or whether the forces of the dive tore it off.

Nine people died in the crash — the pilot, Jeffrey Gregory, the co-pilot, Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras, and seven passengers on a family trip from Texas to the Bahamas. For the families, and for the Greenacres and Palm Beach County residents who lived through the jet falling beside their road, the recorder now in a Washington laboratory may hold the clearest account of the flight's final minutes.