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The Learjet 55 that crashed in Philadelphia is shown at Boeing Field in Seattle in this photo from May 2019.
Days after a Learjet 55 air ambulance crashed in a Philadelphia neighborhood, the NTSB has recovered avionics that could help explain the cause of the devastating accident.
The safety board said Feb. 2 that it had recovered the cockpit voice recorder from the twinjet, which was located at a depth of 8 ft. at the site of the initial impact. Safety investigators also recovered the aircraft’s enhanced ground proximity warning system from a debris field that extended four-to-five city blocks.
Both components were sent to the NTSB Vehicle Recorders Laboratory in Washington, D.C., for further evaluation. Investigators had earlier recovered the jet’s Honeywell TFE731 turbofan engines and were sending all wreckage to a secure location in Delaware for evaluation.
The Learjet 55, Mexican registration XA-UCI, crashed in a commercial and residential area Jan. 31 shortly after taking off from Northeast Philadelphia Airport (PNE) at 6:06 p.m. local time.
Six people on board the aircraft, including a pediatric patient, the patient’s mother, and four crewmembers, as well as a person in a car on the ground were killed, Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker said Feb. 2. Twenty-two other people were injured, three critically, she said.
The jet was operated by Mexico-based Med Jets SA, doing business as Jet Rescue Air Ambulance, and all six occupants were Mexican citizens. The flight crew had filed an IFR flight plan for Springfield-Branson National Airport (SGF) in Springfield, Missouri.
During a Feb. 1 briefing, Ralph Hicks, the NTSB’s investigator in charge, said the Learjet had left Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport at noon the day of the crash and arrived at PNE around 2:15 p.m. The jet departed PNE that evening on Runway 24, climbed to around 1,500 ft. above ground level, turned slightly right and slightly left, and then descended steeply to the ground. The flight lasted less than a minute.
NTSB Board Chair Jennifer Homendy said controllers received no prior notice from pilots of an inflight emergency. “Nothing was communicated,” she said. “In fact, in the recording that we have, there is an attempt by air traffic controllers to get a response from the flight crew that they didn’t receive.”
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