Xm Café

“We’re out of time.” Those may be some of the last words heard from the cockpit of the private jet that plunged into a Florida neighborhood Sunday. Audio circulating online appears to capture the pilots of the Learjet 60 talking with air traffic control before the crash in Greenacres, Palm Beach County. The FAA says nine people were on board, flying from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas. Instead of a vacation, the jet dropped from cruising altitude almost straight down and exploded into a mobile home park just before 1 p.m. Reports say none of the nine survived. Nine families woke up expecting a trip to paradise, and tonight they’re getting the worst call of their lives. The NTSB is now trying to figure out what went so wrong, so fast. What do you think could cause a jet to fall out of the sky that quickly?

Thousands of people watched the video of the Florida jet crash and asked the same thing: where’s the plane? Here’s why you can’t see it: • It fell almost straight down. Unofficial flight tracking shows the Learjet dropped from over 35,000 feet nearly vertical, possibly at several hundred miles per hour. • It shattered on impact. Planes are mostly lightweight aluminum, and hitting the ground nose-first at that speed breaks a jet into thousands of small pieces, many driven deep into the ground. That’s why there’s a crater in the road. • The fuel fire did the rest. Jet fuel ignited instantly, burning and melting much of what was left. • We’ve seen this before. Flight 93 in Shanksville on 9/11 left the same scene: a smoking crater with almost no recognizable wreckage. What most people don’t know: private and charter jets don’t follow the same safety rules as commercial airlines. Airlines operate under the strictest FAA standards for pilot training, rest, and maintenance. Charter flights follow a lighter set of rules, and privately flown jets have even fewer requirements. The NTSB will now collect every fragment to find out what happened in those final seconds. Praying for all 9 families. Should private jets face the same safety rules as commercial airlines?