Dad of 20-year-old co-pilot in Florida Learjet crash says her final radio calls showed ‘she’s tough’

The father of the 20-year-old co-pilot who died along with eight others when their Learjet crashed in Florida said Friday he has listened to his daughter’s heartbreaking final radio transmissions “many times” since the crash.

Allan Filgueiras, a pilot who helped teach his daughter to fly, was searching for answers as to why the plane plunged from the sky on Sunday. Instead, he found immense pride in how his daughter, Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras, handled the crisis.

“I did listen to that many times trying to find a clue. In my head. How’d that happen? And wow, she’s tough,” Allan Filgueiras said at a news conference Friday.

“I wanted to be by her side,” he said, at times holding back tears. “Inside the plane. To help.”

In her conversation with air traffic control, Nathalia Filgueiras can first be heard calmly reporting ice buildup on the plane as it flew into a thunderstorm and turbulence tossed it up and down by 700 feet (200 meters). The situation quickly escalated as the aircraft fell at breathtaking speed. “Declare an emergency 722-Bravo-Delta. We are in an overspeed condition descending 20,000 feet per minute!” she said.

Her father and aviation safety experts are impressed that Filgueiras continued to call out updates on what was happening even as she realized the plane’s fate was sealed.

“For the family — it’s like having the heart torn from my chest,” her father said in Spanish. “I have to find a way to go on living.”

The family wants to push back against online criticism over whether she had enough experience to be in the cockpit of a high-performance business jet. She had more than 1,300 hours of experience and completed extensive training to earn her commercial pilot’s license and get certified for a Learjet. The plane’s captain, 55-year-old Jeff Gregory, is believed to have been at the controls in the aircraft’s final minutes.

So, on Friday, her father held a news conference that his lawyer said was intended to “preserve not just her memory, but her reputation.”

“She was at the top of her class in everything that she did, and she was perfectly qualified to be the co-pilot on this flight, despite her tender years,” attorney Stuart Grossman said, noting there were no immediate plans to file a lawsuit over the crash.

It’s far too early in the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation to know what caused the crash. As it fell, the Learjet accelerated beyond its design limits and pieces of the plane’s tail were found miles away from the crash site.

Allan Filgueiras said he first took his daughter flying at age 12 and later started teaching her to fly. After she got a job as a pilot, she told her dad she couldn’t believe she was getting paid to do something she loved.

“It was her happiest moment, to fly,” he said.

Retired airline pilot John Cox, who is now the CEO of Safety Operating Systems, said earlier this week that his career began similarly to Filgueiras, as he started flying professionally at age 19. He said she was doing quite well to earn that co-pilot’s seat.

“To be in the right seat of a Lear 60, she had to impress somebody, because that’s a good ride. I mean, that’s great. I know she loved it,” Cox said.

Her father believes she handled the crisis better than most.

“She showed me what it is to be a hero because once you see that coming, a lot of the big boys — military or whatever — they can’t handle. And she was the one over there to the last minute fighting,” Allan Filgueiras said.

The crash victims included technology entrepreneur Adam Robinson; his wife, Helen Sharp; and their two young children, relatives said. The family’s nanny, Ana María Ramírez Cetina, was also killed.

Josh Funk, The Associated Press