This jet fell five miles out of the Florida sky in about one minute

The crew called the ice on their wings manageable. A few minutes later, the radio calls and the flight tracking data told a very different story.

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On Sunday, 1 November 2026, a Learjet 60 business jet took off from Austin, Texas, bound for the island of North Eleuthera in the Bahamas. The plane, registration N722BD, was made by Bombardier and is registered to a company in Wilmington, Delaware. Around midday it was cruising east at 35,000 feet. That is higher than the top of Mount Everest, which stands at roughly 29,000 feet.

Below it, southern Florida was having a wet, stormy Sunday. Heavy rain was falling across the region and the National Weather Service had a flood watch in effect through Monday afternoon. Air traffic controllers in Miami were letting pilots steer left and right around rain to the southeast, which one of them called "pretty nasty."

Then the numbers started to move. Flight tracking data from Flightradar24 showed the jet coming down at more than 32,000 feet per minute at one point. That is about 363 miles per hour, straight down. The fastest any Formula One car has ever gone in a Grand Prix is about 231 miles per hour. In roughly a minute, the jet lost about 26,500 feet of height, which is about five miles.

The jet crashed at about 12:50 pm local time in Greenacres, in Palm Beach County. All nine people on board were killed. Officials say no one on the ground was hurt. Investigators do not yet know why it happened.

The story of those last minutes comes from air traffic control recordings, reported by ABC News, the Associated Press, Forbes and CBS News.

At 35,000 feet, the crew reported turbulence, icing and rain, and asked to climb 2,000 feet higher. Forbes reported the request as a climb to 37,000 feet. The pilot described the conditions calmly: "We have light, clear ice that is manageable and moderate turbulence."

The bumps were not small. According to ABC News, the turbulence was throwing the jet up and down by as much as 700 feet. That is more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty from the ground to the tip of the torch, about 305 feet.

Shortly after that, everything changed. The pilot radioed: "We're descending 8,000, mayday, mayday, we're descending 10,000 feet per minute." Ten thousand feet per minute is a little over 110 miles per hour of pure falling.

The next call was worse: "We are in an overspeed condition descending 20,000 feet per minute." Then: "We're going to crash into the ground." ABC News and the AP both report that the jet banked sharply to the right before it hit.

The tracking numbers make the speed of this easier to see. According to Flightradar24 data published by AirDataNews, at 17:48 UTC the jet was at 35,250 feet, moving at 437 knots, which is about 500 miles per hour, and still climbing gently.

Moments later it was at 28,950 feet, moving at 505 knots, about 580 miles per hour, and descending at nearly 20,000 feet per minute. By 17:49 UTC, the last recorded altitude was 8,750 feet. CBS News describes the last data point as nearly 9,000 feet.

Subtract one from the other and you get about 26,500 feet. A mile is 5,280 feet, so that is a drop of about five miles. The two timestamps are one minute apart, which is why "about one minute" is the honest way to say it.

The sources do not agree exactly on the peak speed of the fall. Forbes and CBS News cite Flightradar24 data showing more than 32,000 feet per minute. The Associated Press, using recordings and tracking data, says the rate climbed from 10,000 to as much as 30,000 feet per minute. Either way, it is about three times the rate in the pilot's first mayday call.

Here is the part that surprises many people. In a dive like this, the problem is not only that the plane is going down. It is also how fast it is going.

Every aircraft has a top speed it is designed to handle safely. The pilot's words, "overspeed condition," mean the jet was going faster than that. The AP reported that the descent went beyond the jet's design limits.

Think of a bike rolling down a steep hill. The steeper the hill, the faster it goes, and the harder it is to slow down. An airplane pointing steeply down picks up speed in a similar way.

That is why the radio calls matter so much. Across just a few radio calls, the numbers went from 8,000 feet, to 10,000 feet per minute, to 20,000 feet per minute. Each call was a snapshot of a situation getting faster than any crew would want.

None of this says what started the dive. That is the question investigators now have to answer.

Ice was part of the conversation in the cockpit, so it is worth knowing what it can do in general.

The FAA's advisory circular on icing, written as guidance for pilots and operators, says ice can change the shape of a wing. It says ice can reduce the lift a wing makes and increase drag several times over. It also says ice can cause a plane to stall at a significantly higher speed than normal.

A stall does not mean the engine stops. It means the wing stops making enough lift to hold the plane up. A wing works because air flows smoothly over its curved shape. Ice can roughen and reshape that curve, a bit like trying to slice bread with a knife that has lumps glued to the blade.

Former NTSB chair Robert Sumwalt told CBS News that ice adds weight but, more importantly, disrupts the smooth flow of air over the top of the wings. He said that when icing leads to a loss of control, it is very hard to recover.

That is general knowledge about icing, not a finding about this flight. The crew described the ice as light and manageable, and investigators have not said what role, if any, it played.

The jet came down by South Military Trail, a busy road, between Cresthaven Boulevard and 10th Avenue North. It left a burning crater, and wreckage landed on the lawn of a mobile home park.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis described it this way: "It was like a missile coming down and a massive explosion, debris going everywhere."

About 600 people living in the mobile home park were evacuated while federal investigators worked at the site. According to CBS12, the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office said that stretch of Military Trail could stay closed for weeks.

The National Transportation Safety Board, or NTSB, is leading the investigation, and the FAA is supporting it. The cause is unknown.

According to the NTSB, a preliminary report is typically available within about two weeks of an accident.

Investigators will look at the radar track, the weather, the radio calls and the wreckage. The data already shows how fast this jet fell. What it cannot show yet is why a crew that called the ice manageable was, minutes later, in a dive no one could stop. Will the answer be the weather, the machine, or something nobody has thought of yet?