US aviation investigators believe parts of a private jet may have broken away while it was still airborne before the aircraft crashed onto a busy highway in Florida on Sunday, killing all nine people on board.
The Learjet 60 was travelling from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas when it plunged onto Military Trail, a six-lane highway in Palm Beach, at approximately 12:50pm local time, exploding on impact.
Among the victims were a technology entrepreneur, his young family and a 20-year-old co-pilot.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said investigators had uncovered preliminary evidence suggesting that the aircraft may have begun breaking apart before striking the ground.
“We do have some evidence that there was some breakup of the aircraft before impact,” NTSB official Tom Chapman told reporters.
“We may find parts of the aircraft some distance away from the actual impact site.”
The crash scattered debris across nearby sports fields, businesses and residential properties, while the impact created a large crater in the highway near the entrance to a mobile home park.
Investigators said severe weather conditions would be a major focus of the inquiry, with heavy rainfall and thunderstorms reported in the area around the time of the accident.
The weather has also complicated recovery operations, as the crater created by the aircraft has partially filled with water.
“The biggest obstacle that we’re going to have is recovering the major wreckage from the impacted crater on the roadway,” lead investigator Tim Monville said during a news conference on Monday.
Investigators are attempting to recover essential aircraft components and determine whether the jet was equipped with a cockpit voice recorder that could provide further information about the final moments of the flight.
Preliminary flight analysis indicates that the aircraft was descending at an exceptionally high rate, losing hundreds of feet in altitude every second before impact.
However, investigators have not established what caused the rapid descent or whether structural failure occurred before the aircraft lost control.
The NTSB investigation is continuing, with officials examining weather conditions, wreckage patterns and available flight data to reconstruct the sequence of events leading to the disaster.