As federal aviation safety officials continue to piece together the details of a catastrophic private jet crash that killed all nine occupants last week, new details have emerged confirming the victims were en route to a long-planned family getaway at a luxury Harbour Island, Eleuthera, resort. Tech entrepreneur Adam Robinson, 45, had arranged a multi-day stay at the Ocean View Club for his family and accompanying travel party, a property the group had visited previously, according to venue manager Ben Simmons who spoke to reporters this week.
The ill-fated travel party departed Austin, Texas, aboard a Learjet on a Sunday, slated for a just-over-two-hour flight to North Eleuthera International Airport. Instead, the aircraft went down in a fiery impact in Palm Beach County, Florida, cutting short the lives of Robinson, his 40-year-old wife Helen Sharp, their two young children – 4-year-old Emma and 2-year-old Charlie – their family nanny Anita Maria Cetina, family friends Rachael Reed and Charmi Fehr, and two experienced flight crew members.
Local Harbour Island, a tight-knit community famous for its iconic pink-sand beaches, was left reeling by news of the tragedy. Susanna Moldawer, Sharp’s aunt, shared that the couple had traveled to the island earlier in 2024 for a family wedding, describing the victims as a warm, beloved family whose loss was “unspeakably sad” as relatives began making memorial arrangements. Robinson, a former Wall Street trader turned successful software founder, led three prominent digital firms: Retention.com, RB2B, and Robly Email Marketing. Sharp, a respected business leader in her own right, served as founding CEO of Influential PR and operated a popular ceramics studio, Helen Sharp Ceramics.
The flight crew brought a mix of deep experience and fast-rising aviation talent: 55-year-old Captain Jeff Gregory boasted a multi-decade career in commercial and private aviation, was known in his Boca Raton community as a devout family man, and leaves behind a wife and grown children. His 20-year-old co-pilot Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras had earned her private pilot’s license at just 17 years old while still a senior at West Boca Raton Community High School, and had already accumulated more than 1,300 logged flight hours at the time of the crash.
Leading the official investigation is the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), with technical support from the Federal Aviation Administration. Investigators have confirmed severe in-flight weather, including icing and extreme turbulence, is a core line of inquiry, after reviewing air traffic control transmissions captured moments before the disaster. Recordings show Filgueiras alerting Miami air traffic controllers that ice was building on the airframe, and that the jet was being tossed more than 700 feet up and down by violent turbulence. The crew reported a rapid 10,000-foot-per-minute descent, followed by an overspeed event that pushed the craft into a 20,000-foot-per-minute plunge, with final transmissions capturing Filgueiras crying out “We’re going to die!” and Gregory reciting the Lord’s Prayer in the jet’s final moments.
NTSB board member Tom Chapman shared new wreckage analysis that confirms the aircraft began breaking apart mid-flight long before ground impact: sections of the jet’s tail were found more than a mile away from the main crash crater, while the critical elevator control surface – which regulates the plane’s up-and-down pitch – was recovered in three separate pieces scattered as far as 3.8 miles from the primary wreckage site. Chapman noted that total loss of the elevator would have made it physically impossible for the pilots to pull the jet out of its fatal nose dive, and that even if the part had remained attached, the extreme speeds recorded during the emergency likely would have rendered it ineffective. The NTSB expects to release a preliminary factual report on the crash within 30 days, but investigators note that a full, definitive root cause determination will likely take more than 12 months to complete.
Learjet crash victims planned to visit Briland’s Ocean View
