The co-pilot of a Learjet that crashed in Florida has been identified as a 20-year-old who obtained her pilot license while in high school.
Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras’ mother, Camilla, and stepfather, Thiago, confirmed that she was co-piloting the aircraft from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas before it suddenly entered a steep nosedive, eventually slamming into the ground in Palm Beach County and erupting into a fireball.
Camilla told The New York Post that Filgueiras had been working as a commercial pilot for nine months prior to the fatal incident.
Nathalia Gadelha Figueiras, 20, was serving as co-pilot aboard a private Learjet that crashed in Palm Beach County, Florida, on Sunday.
She earned her pilot’s license at 17 and dreamed of becoming a commercial airline pilot. All nine people aboard the aircraft were killed in the crash, which occurred as the jet was traveling from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas.
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“I wanted her to live her dream, but I knew that her dream was going to be the thing that would take her away from me,” she said. “I knew that a plane was gonna take her away from me. I always knew it but I was so proud of her. I know she was living her dream.”
She wasn’t always supportive, especially when the girl first came to her declaring that she would be a pilot after experiencing a flight in her father’s Beechcraft Bonanza.
“One day after flying with him, she came home, and we were in our room, and she walked in, and she said, ‘I’m gonna be a pilot’ and I said, ‘No, you won’t,” the tearful mother remembered. “Thiago looked at me, and said, ‘If that’s what she wants to be, she will be a pilot,’ and I was like, ‘No she won’t.’”
Thiago noted that despite her age, Filgueiras had 1,300 hours of flying experience. He also noted that she had shot her boyfriend a text just 10 minutes before her final moments.
“She just said, ‘I’ve got turbulence, I’ve got ice,’” he recalled.
Filgueiras once addressed jokes that she knew how to fly a plane before she could drive a car.
“I like being different than everyone, so to me I think it’s cool that like it’s not really an opportunity,” she said. “I just didn’t do it, and this is how it ended up. But I think it’s cool. Some people think that it’s weird that I can fly planes, but I can’t drive a car, I mean I can but, a lot of people think it’s funny. I think it’s funny, and I now want my [driver’s] license really bad.”
Nine people died as a result of the Sunday crash, and authorities have not released identifying information of the other eight aboard the plane.
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Sierra Marlee is a millennial whose hunger for the truth in a world of fake news has led her to write. Marlee also contributes to BizPac Review.
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