A decorated Top Gun adversary fighter pilot and combat veteran delivered a raw, no-nonsense breakdown of the Learjet 60 that slammed into a Palm Beach County neighborhood Sunday, killing all nine people aboard in a high-speed dive that left almost nothing of the aircraft intact.
Matthew “Whiz” Buckley, speaking from just up the road in a video posted early Monday, called the crash “absolutely devastating” and warned people not to listen to the air traffic control audio. “Don’t listen to the ATC tape,” he said. “It’s just not worth it listening to somebody in horror and knowing they’re about to die. Horrible.”
Buckley laid out the grim weather picture over South Florida that day. Thunderstorm tops were punching up into the 40,000-foot range. “Not a good day to fly,” he said. From the ATC reports of light clear ice, moderate turbulence, precipitation, and outside temperatures around minus 47 Celsius, he concluded the crew was trying to skim along the tops of the bad weather. “Sounds like they were trying to skim along the tops of the bad weather, turbulence, icing. Sounds like they got iced up and potentially departed the aircraft, stalled.”
He zeroed in on the Learjet 60’s well-known vulnerability. “That T-tail in the Learjet is pretty sensitive, man.” Buckley said he slowed down the impact video frame by frame. “It doesn’t look like they have their tail, the horizontal stab. So they’re not going to regain control.” He added that in one frame it even looked like the left wing was gone.
The numbers were brutal. The jet was coming down from the mid-30,000-foot range. Buckley estimated it hit roughly 550 knots, about 500 miles an hour, straight downhill, just subsonic. At those speeds, he said, wreckage is minimal. “For all the conspiracy theorists, man, all the smoothbrain people out there, a jet going straight down at over 500 knots, just subsonic, there ain’t going to be nothing left. I’ve been part of a couple military mishaps where there’s a piece of skin and a wedding ring. So enough with the conspiracy theories. It wasn’t shot down. It wasn’t a drone.”
Buckley clarified the voices on the radio. The woman heard speaking to controllers was the pilot not flying, handling the radios while the flying pilot fought a hopeless battle. “One pilot was fighting the airplane trying to save it, but it was impossible without a tail. And the other one was talking over the radio.”
He stressed the human cost. “These are nine people who woke up in Austin this morning and didn’t think they were going to have the worst day of their lives. Just absolutely heartbreaking.” Buckley said he would not have been flying over South Florida that day. “We can sit here and Monday morning quarterback all we want, but I would not have been flying an airplane over South Florida today.”
In follow-up posts, Buckley added two more technical observations. He noted that the conditions pointed to “Mach Tuck,” which can put an aircraft into coffin corner at high altitude. And he was blunt about weather avoidance: “If there’s any doubt, there’s no doubt. You don’t try to fly through or above weather like that.”
Buckley closed by calling for basic decency. “God bless these souls. God bless their families. Let’s just have a little bit of heart and let’s pray.”
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash of N722BD, which left a massive crater near Military Trail and 10th Avenue North after the jet dropped from cruise altitude in roughly a minute. No one on the ground was injured.
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