Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) of the United States recovered the cockpit voice recorder from the Learjet 60 that crashed on November 1 in Greenacres, Florida, resulting in the death of the nine people on board.
The device—one of the two commonly referred to as "black boxes"—was located at the point of initial impact during the excavation work at the crater and transferred to the vehicle recorders laboratory of the NTSB in Washington, D.C., where technicians will assess whether it contains recoverable audio.
The agency has not yet confirmed whether the recorder was damaged or if it was functioning properly before the incident.
The aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti, consulted by The Associated Press, expressed cautious optimism upon viewing the photographs released by the NTSB: “It is very plausible that any information stored in the recorder has survived,” he stated, noting that the orange metallic casing of the device appeared to be in reasonable condition.
However, Guzzetti warned that the physical recovery of the device does not guarantee the existence of useful data, and he recalled the case of the CVR from the medical transport plane that crashed in Philadelphia in January 2025, which apparently had not been functioning for years.
The cockpit voice recorder captures conversations between the pilots, radio communications, alarms, and ambient sounds. Analyzing this data could shed light on what happened in the final moments of the flight, when the crew faced severe turbulence, ice formation, and catastrophic loss of control.
The radio communications had already been publicly released since November 2, revealing the dramatic final moments of the flight: the pilot even shouted, "We're going to crash to the ground!" and "We've run out of time!" before the impact.
Researchers are also trying to understand why the aircraft initially avoided a large storm cell and later headed towards another one that formed rapidly. The co-pilot had informed the controllers that the plane was rising and falling more than 700 feet (213 meters) and requested an alternative route to navigate through the area.
The Learjet 60, operated by Aurora Aviation under the trade name Upper Jets, had taken off from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in Texas, bound for North Eleuthera Airport in the Bahamas, when it plunged into a residential street in Greenacres, south of West Palm Beach.
Among the nine identified victims are Texas tech entrepreneur Adam Robinson, his wife, and their two young children aged four and two, in addition to three female passengers and the two pilots.
The investigation has also revealed indications that the plane may have begun to fragment before the impact: three pieces of the left elevator —the tail surface that controls the pitch— were found between two and 6.1 kilometers from the impact point.
The NTSB has concluded its primary activities at the accident site, although the official cause has not yet been determined. Investigators are examining the role of weather conditions, ice formation, turbulence, and a possible structural failure, or a combination of all these factors.
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