Tony Gardner

Minutes before a private jet fell out of the sky onto a Florida street on Sunday, the pilots radioed in something that really shouldn't happen. They said ice was building up on the plane, and the temperature outside was 53 below zero. At 53 below, there's almost no liquid water left in the air to freeze. Pretty much all of it has already turned into tiny ice crystals, and crystals mostly bounce right off a cold wing. For ice to stick and build up, you need water that's colder than freezing and somehow still liquid. Up at 35,000 feet, there's basically one place you find that. It's the middle of a thunderstorm, where air rushes upward so fast it carries raindrops up before they get a chance to freeze. So when the crew said "ice," they were also telling you where they were. Everything else they told Miami Center points the same way. The turbulence was bouncing the jet up and down 700 feet at a time. Then they started flying through rain, at an altitude where weather is normally way below you. One radar analysis puts the jet inside a storm core a few minutes before it went down. Florida storms can build past 40,000 feet, so climbing another 2,000 may not have gotten them out of it. Miami okayed the climb. Less than 30 seconds later the jet called out that it was descending, then mayday, then that it was in an "overspeed condition." In the reconstruction, the crew says they're banked 60 degrees. At that tilt, only half of the wing's lift is still holding the plane up. The biggest update came Monday, from the wreckage. The NTSB says there's evidence the plane was already coming apart before it hit the ground, with debris spread over about half a mile of ball fields and homes. Jeff Guzzetti, who used to investigate crashes for the NTSB and the FAA, said pieces of the tail may have broken off in the turbulence or the dive. If that happened, nobody in that cockpit could have flown it out. That matters for the question people always ask after something like this, whether the pilots could have saved it. If the tail came off up high, it was over before anyone on the street looked up. Investigators haven't identified the debris yet, and they still don't know if the cockpit voice recorder made it through the crater. Nine people were on board, including a mom and dad and their two young kids. The NTSB is asking anyone with video from Sunday to send it to [email protected]. The crew went from calling the ice "manageable" to calling mayday in about a minute.