Nathalia Gadelha was twenty years old and already living the dream most of us only talk about. Now her name is tied to one of the most heartbreaking aviation tragedies South Florida has seen in a long time. Her family identified her as the co-pilot killed when a Learjet 60 went down in Palm Beach County, taking all nine people aboard with it, according to The Times.
As previously reported, the jet was flying out of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in Texas, bound for the Bahamas, when it came down in a residential area near Cresthaven just before 1 p.m. on Sunday, November 1. Flight tracking showed the plane cruising east at 35,000 feet when the pilot started reporting trouble, and the radio call was chilling: “We’re going to crash into the ground.” Crews had reported icing, turbulence and precipitation before the mayday went out.
One witness summed up what the sky delivered: “It looked like a missile going down.” The picture got worse from there. Flight data showed the jet falling at a rate of more than 20,000 feet per minute before it hit the ground near a mobile home park. Authorities evacuated roughly 600 people from that community while federal investigators got to work.
Gadelha’s story is what has people stopping mid-scroll. She earned her private pilot’s license at 17 while attending West Boca Raton High School, after starting lessons in 2020 with her father teaching her. The Palm Beach County school district’s Aviation Academy paid for that license, and she told reporters her goal was flying for a commercial airline.
When local news caught up with her at 17, she joked that folks told her she couldn’t drive, and her answer was “Yeah, but I can fly.”
Her mother, Camila, and her stepfather confirmed to the New York Post that she was the co-pilot. Worth noting that authorities have not publicly released the victims’ names, and the family’s identification doesn’t independently prove she was the voice on the circulating air traffic control audio.
As for the why, nobody has the answer yet. The NTSB says it will weigh every possible factor, including how the crew handled the icing and turbulence, and it isn’t ruling anything out this early. The FAA is sending a team to support that investigation.