I cannot stop thinking about the plane that crashed in Florida on Sunday. I was watching a simulation of the final moments including the audio from within the cockpit and the co-pilot’s final words were “Look outside, Jeff, look outside. Holy f***, we’re out of time.” Jeff was the pilot. It was at this point, the plane slammed into the ground travelling at 51,000 feet per minute.

The outline of the right wing is visible in photographs. Etched into the tarmac, the wings likely folded up vertically and according to one YouTube video, there was one sixtieth of a second between the nose impacting the ground and the very back of the plane concertinaing into the front of the plane. Half the time it takes to blink one’s eyes. And that was it, for everyone on board. Vaporised on the spot.

A bystander was there very quickly and his cellphone footage shows a deep crater, lots of low-level flames, what looks to be some clothing hanging from a telegraph pole wire but nothing of people. Just a few small pieces of aircraft fuselage. The NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) have found three pieces of the horizontal stabilizer some miles away, so on inspection that will suggest whether it came off due to metal fatigue, or poor maintenance and that then began the steep out-of-control descent or whether it came off due to the forces exerted on the aircraft, as they plummeted.

77 seconds is all it took from a usual flying situation through clouds to instant death, although the journey down and especially when they broke through the clouds and saw the ground rushing up to meet them, must have been utterly terrifying.

Would I be ready to die in 77 seconds, if it came down to it? I’ve had an horrendous year health-wise and at one point, was facing a possible prognosis of pancreatic cancer and if that had been the case, that would have been it for me. I can recall the terror I felt. I was however, in a hospital at the time. I was in a great deal of discomfort but I was in a surgical setting. I had acute pancreatitis, which has left me a lifelong diabetic.

To be doing something I loved and expecting to survive the day and have many years of life still left in me and to suddenly be faced with certain death, how would I deal with that? Some within the media have stated the 20-year-old co-pilot, Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras, behaved unprofessionally in her final moments, by screaming and using an expletive, just before the plane she was in violently dove nose-first into the ground at high speed, killing her and all onboard, instantly. How does anyone know how they would act or what they would say, placed in that situation?

Others have made mention of her young age, as a form of criticism of her abilities. She was qualified to be in that role. She earned her pilot’s licence at 17 and had logged more than 1300 hours of flight time. I think she equipped herself admirably, considering the circumstances.

In time, I hope a permanent memorial is placed at the crash site, for family, friends and those who would like to, to come along and lay floral tributes and pay their respects.

Those who perished onboard the 2026 Palm Beach County Learjet 60 crash, were:-

Flight Crew

• Jeffrey Gregory – Pilot
• Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras – Co-pilot

Passengers

• Adam Robinson – Tech entrepreneur
• Helen Sharp – Wife of Adam Robinson
• Emma Robinson – Daughter
• Charles (Charlie) Robinson – Son
• Anita Maria Cetina – Robinson family nanny / caregiver
• Rachael Reed – Robinson family friend
• Charmi Fehr – Robinson family friend

May they all Rest in Peace.