TRANSCRIPT 🔗
00:00:04
Speaker 1: From The Australian, here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Wednesday, November 3, 2026. Misogyny and homophobia online are bigger drivers of radicalisation than religion. That's the hugely controversial take from the Australian Human Rights Commission, which puts it at odds with police and terrorism experts. That's an exclusive live now at theaustralian.com.au. What would it be like to be inside a plane plunging to the ground? We have a stunning insight inside the cockpit of a doomed private jet as a young co-pilot talks to air traffic controllers who are forced to listen as she and eight others slam into the ground. What went wrong in what should have been a joyful holiday flight? Why did the plane crash? And does the audio and video reshape the way we think about flying? Robin Ironside is the Australian's aviation writer, and I've called her in to talk me through the most unbelievable audio and video I've ever seen of a plane crashing. Robin, this is the Bombardier Learjet 60 that crashed in Florida on the 1st of November, killing nine people. Let's just talk about the final moments of those people's lives. We see them slam into the road as a driver is going past the driver and only narrowly escapes death. And what intrigues me about it is how fast this plane is going and that it seems to be flying into the ground rather than what I thought a plane crash would look like. Maybe I thought it would be tumbling or coasting. It is heading nose down into the tarmac. What do you think is going on there? And were you surprised by that?
00:02:13
Speaker 2: It's certainly very confronting footage to watch. I've seen some experts describe that aircraft as a flying dart. And I think that's probably accurate. I mean, it certainly looked like that. The way it speared into the ground at such speed with such force, it left a significant crater, like it lifted up chunks of bitumen. and left that huge hole in the ground.
00:02:39
Speaker 3: It's awful.
00:02:41
Speaker 1: Can anything be recovered from that crash scene that would be useful to investigators?
00:02:46
Speaker 2: We're still waiting to hear if they have been able to recover the black box recorders, which will be very helpful to investigators to understand what exactly happened with that aircraft. I mean, there has been speculation that as a result of flying into a storm cell the horizontal stabilizer broke off and the only way was down.
00:03:13
Speaker 1: So air traffic control recordings have been released, Robin, and they're also very confronting. We hear the co-pilot, Natalia Filgueras, who was 20 years old, although her family says she got her pilot's licence when she was 17. Really revealing a bit of a chilling sequence. First, she reports some moderate turbulence and what she says is manageable icing at 35,000 feet. And she's asking air traffic control for something.
00:04:07
Speaker 3: What do you think is going on there?
00:04:10
Speaker 1: What's she asking for? She's asking, I guess, for a path around the storm activity because certainly the flight radar images show a massive sort.
00:04:18
Speaker 3: Of storm over a lot of the United States.
00:04:37
Speaker 2: And up until just before the descent, I mean, they had done extremely well to avoid the red part of the storm activity and to sort of skirt the fringes of it.
00:04:48
Speaker 1: You can expect that to rise ahead. Roger, it's your Bravo Delta. And now we're picking up precipitation.
00:04:58
Speaker 3: We need to climb 350.
00:05:01
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, as a result of asking to go up higher, they seem to go straight into a very severe storm. And that's thought to be what perhaps resulted in part of the aircraft breaking up and resulted in that descent.
00:05:20
Speaker 1: Right. So she asked air traffic control if they can go up. The air traffic control essentially says yes. and says to her that she's going to get an easier ride or a smoother ride from here on. So they ascend, and then suddenly things obviously go wrong very quickly, but it doesn't seem to be clear to her that something has broken off the plane or that there's an issue with the plane itself. She asks or declares a mayday. 722 Bravo Delta, we're descending 8,000, mayday, mayday, we're descending 10,000 feet per minute. And then it sounds like there's an extreme, like uncontrolled descent going on. Is that what the loss of that part would do? Well, yes, that's my understanding of it on an aircraft like the Lear 60, which is unusual in that it has very thin wings.
00:06:22
Speaker 2: Wings and they're very sensitive to things like icing, which can result in destabilization. And that combined, I think, with the loss of something like the horizontal stabilizer would certainly disrupt the aerodynamics of that aircraft to the extent that it was placed into a nosedive. I mean, you hear that in the air traffic control audio, that the rate of the dive just seems to be getting faster and faster, 10,000 feet. 20,000 feet, it's harrowing listening.
00:06:55
Speaker 1: Eventually it gets to what seems like what's been reported as 32,000 feet per minute. I mean, I struggle to even comprehend that. How would that compare to the normal rate of descent of a plane that we're used to being on?
00:07:08
Speaker 2: Well, usually the rate of descent is very gentle. It's something like between 1,000, 1,500 feet a minute.
00:07:12
Speaker 3: So yeah, it's very.
00:07:17
Speaker 2: Gentle and a lot of passengers, other than the ears popping, probably barely even notice it. So it's sort of unimaginable what that would be like. And you can see that from the footage, just how fast that aircraft is going, how quickly the end happens.
00:07:46
Speaker 1: We're going to crash into the ground, 722 Bravo Delta. November 2, Bravo Delta, I'm here with you.
00:07:53
Speaker 3: Talk to me.
00:07:54
Speaker 1: We are descending 22,000 feet, and we are banking 60 degrees.
00:07:57
Speaker 3: November
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2, Bravo Delta, roger.
00:08:00
Speaker 1: Look outside, Jack! Look outside! Holy f * * *, we're out of time. The investigators have already said that the debris has been spread over a wide area on the ground and that's I think one of the reasons why they think it might have broken apart in the air before the ground impact. Do you think there's any possibility that in the last sort of few seconds of silence before the plane crashes and after we hear the last words from the young co-pilot that they were all still alive? Is there any doubt that they would have all been alive as the plane went into the ground?
00:09:01
Speaker 3: It's almost too awful to contemplate.
00:09:04
Speaker 2: Certainly there's been talk about the G-forces inside the aircraft when it was descending at that rate.
00:09:12
Speaker 3: I mean, I'd like to think perhaps they were unconscious.
00:09:16
Speaker 2: But, yeah, given the conversations with the air traffic control quite late into the flight, you can only imagine that perhaps those on board had a pretty good idea of what was happening. Look outside, Jack! Look outside!
00:09:31
Speaker 1: Holy f * * *, we're out of time! Many of us can only imagine ever going on a private jet, but I think passengers might assume that going on a private jet is a bit like going on a commercial airliner, that the safety regulations, the experience of the pilots and so on would be pretty much the same. Is that right?
00:10:00
Speaker 3: Well, yes.
00:10:00
Speaker 2: I mean, they're all covered by the same air safety regulations as any aircraft, and they are expected to keep up with their maintenance, have well-experienced pilots. Some would say they are expected to even achieve a higher level of safety given that the people flying on them are paying significant amounts of money to be carried, in this instance, from Austin to the Bahamas. I'm sure they would have been paying a significant amount to fly and fly safely to their destination.
00:10:34
Speaker 1: Let's talk about Natalia Filgueras-Robin. She's talking to the pilot. It sounds to me as though she might be the pilot navigator who is talking to air traffic control and she's responsible for comms, while the other pilot, the pilot is actually flying the plane. Is that your sense of it too? And what do you make of the way she kept up those communications as the plane went down?
00:10:57
Speaker 2: I find it extraordinary that she was so calm, as was the air traffic controller. I mean, right up to those final moments when it was clear that they weren't going to survive this incident. It was pretty incredible, really, that she could continue to keep calling out those altitude, those speed readings.
00:11:16
Speaker 3: And keep the air.
00:11:17
Speaker 2: Traffic controller informed about what was happening on board the aircraft.
00:11:22
Speaker 1: Her family says that Natalia Filgueras had 1,300 hours of flying experience, that she'd learned to fly before she could drive. What do you
think about that? And given that she was not actually flying the plane, that she was sitting next to the pilot, is that enough for someone who's got the lives of family in their hands? Yes.
00:11:40
Speaker 2: Well, we don't know a lot about the pilot flying. I mean, there is always a pilot flying, a pilot monitoring. In this case, she was the pilot monitoring. She wasn't actually flying the plane. We haven't heard a lot about the pilot flying, what his experience was, how many hours he had clocked up. I mean, 1,300 hours is certainly a reasonable amount. And I don't think that should be discounted. It's pretty awful. Some of the commentary on social media about, you know, because it was a woman pilot, they were doomed. It was quite, you know, disgusting to hear things like that. She sounded like she was a competent pilot just listening to the way she was, you know, so calm right up until probably the last 45 seconds. Yeah, I think that spoke volumes about her professionalism and the fact that she was a fairly experienced pilot despite her very young age.
00:12:36
Speaker 1: November 2, Bravo Delta, Miami, how do you hear? November 541, Quebec Sierra, contact Miami Center, 126.32. November 632, 541 Quebec Sierra. November 722, Bravo Delta, how do you hear? November 722, Bravo Delta. Southwest 918, did you get anything back?
00:13:06
Speaker 2: No, of course not.
00:13:11
Speaker 1: You've covered the aftermath of a lot of crashes. I mean, what's your instinct about this one? Do you think there's going to be revealed to be some potentially problem with this slightly older style of aircraft? Or do you think there'll be some sort of pilot error? Or will this just be an unavoidable mistake?
00:13:28
Speaker 2: Well, usually with aircraft incidents, they say a Swiss cheese model applies. And in the event of plane crashes, it's when basically all the holes line up. So it's not usually just one thing. It's usually a number of things that unfortunately align to create a circumstance in which an aircraft crashes. So in this case, it seems to be a combination of the weather, perhaps the aircraft design to a certain extent, and I guess maybe the choices that were made in terms of the path of the aircraft. I'm sure that's They're the things that the investigators will be looking at, maintenance records, pilot experience, as well as the weather, all of those things that will help explain what happened.
00:14:16
Speaker 1: I definitely feel safer the bigger the aircraft is. It's not an option for me to fly in private jets anyway. Is that true? Are you safer on a gigantic kind of commercial airliner than you are on a smaller aircraft?
00:14:29
Speaker 2: Well, certainly commercial jet airliners have an extremely low level of accidents or they have a very low accident rate. In Australia, there hasn't been a commercial jet airliner crash ever. And in America, unfortunately, in the last couple of years, we have seen a couple of sad occurrences. At the beginning of last year, there was that awful mid-air collision involving a jet and a And then there was the UPS cargo flight that crashed in Louisville in July last year that was also incredibly confronting, harrowing footage. So they do happen, but they are extremely rare given the hundreds of thousands of aircraft movements that take place every week.
00:15:26
Speaker 1: Now we can see what it's like too. I mean, this is something that previously we've only really ever seen the aftermath of crashes, haven't we? A field of debris or a hole in the ground or a charred kind of shell of a fuselage. Do you think it'll change people's sort of perceptions of flying now that we see what it actually looks like when these flights end like this?
00:15:47
Speaker 2: I think anyone who is a nervous flyer would be terrified by this footage, given that it's pretty much viral.
00:15:58
Speaker 3: It's everywhere.
00:15:59
Speaker 2: It's on every social media. It's hard to avoid, as is the air traffic control audio. Despite warnings, I'm sure a lot of people are listening to it and finding it completely harrowing. And yes, I do think it will concern a lot of people. I mean, typically, aviation is very safe. It's safer to fly than it is to drive a car. So I guess people have to keep that in the back of their minds. that they are typically safer in an aircraft, especially in countries like the US, like Australia, where air safety regulation is very strict.
00:16:38
Speaker 1: Robyn Ironside, thank you very much.
00:16:39
Speaker 3: Thanks, Clare.
00:16:50
Speaker 1: Robyn Ironside is The Australian's Aviation Writer. You can check out all Robyn's work anytime. at the Australian.com.au.