A pilot flying the same Learjet that later crashed in Florida was reprimanded by air traffic control months earlier after having reportedly underestimated the severity of turbulence.
The newly released audio comes after the devastating crash on Sunday November 1, which killed all nine people on board the Learjet aircraft.
Newly released audio from May Learjet flight raises questions over safety
The exchange took place in May this year, when the female pilot was flying the aircraft over Newark, New Jersey, with an air traffic controller who could be heard questioning her decision to climb, asking: “Why are you climbing?”
The pilot explained that the crew had been preparing to contact him because they were struggling with turbulence, stating: “We are just about to call you, we are experiencing moderate [turbulence] and unable to hold altitude.”
However, the controller appeared unimpressed by her description of the conditions, ordering the aircraft to descend, dismissing her claim, responding: “That is not moderate; descend to 4,000 [feet] immediately.
“If you can’t maintain altitude that is not moderate, that is severe turbulence, are you experiencing severe turbulence?”, he continued.
Both the woman and a male voice then responded: “Affirmative sir,” before the recording ended.
While it remains unclear whether the female pilot heard in the recording was 20-year-old Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras, who was killed alongside eight others when the Learjet crashed, the aircraft involved in the earlier exchange carried the same registration number, N7226D, as the jet that plunged to the ground while traveling from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas.
Filgueiras, who grew up in Palm Beach County, had previously attracted attention in a local media report after obtaining her pilot’s licence in 2023, aged just 17, and speaking to CBS12 at the time, she admitted: “I definitely do brag because people say, ‘Oh, you can’t drive,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, but I can fly.'”
Her mother, Camila, regularly shared pH๏τographs of Filgueiras and her siblings traveling on private aircraft, while her father, Allan, also held a pilot’s license.
Camila described her daughter’s pᴀssion for flying when speaking to The New York Times, saying: “She loved the freedom. It was completely different seeing the world from the top.”
Filgueiras also shared several videos of herself flying on social media, with footage uncovered by the Daily Mail showing her at the controls of the same Learjet in September.
Details of the fatal crash
The aircraft was involved in a devastating crash just weeks later, with shocking dashcam footage capturing it plunging towards the ground at an almost vertical angle.
Experts have suggested the jet was traveling at close to the speed of sound when it hit the ground, triggering a huge explosion, with debris sent flying into the air as thick black smoke ascended from the scene.
The first pᴀssengers identified among those killed were married couple, Adam Robinson, 45, and Helen Sharp, 40, along with their two children, as previously reported by the Daily Mail.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) also confirmed at a press conference on Monday that a man on the ground had suffered a leg injury after being struck by debris.
At the time of Sunday’s disaster, Filgueiras and her fellow pilot, 55-year-old Jeff Gregory, were attempting to navigate through two storm systems, known as cells, leading several aviation experts to suggest that the Learjet may have encountered a phenomenon known as ‘coffin corner’ while attempting to climb above the storms.
At high altitudes, the difference between an aircraft’s minimum safe speed and maximum safe speed becomes extremely narrow, as flying too slowly can cause a stall, while exceeding the upper limit can result in a loss of control.
As the twin-engine business jet approached the area, air traffic controllers in Miami had authorised pilots to “deviate left and right” to avoid weather conditions, warning of “moderate precipitation… to the southeast”, describing the conditions as “pretty nasty”.
Controllers subsequently referred to moderate turbulence before the situation appeared to deteriorate rapidly.
In a series of increasingly desperate radio transmissions, Filgueiras reported that the aircraft was losing altitude.
“Seven two two bravo delta, we’re descending 8,000… mayday mayday… we’re descending 10,000ft per minute,” she exclaimed.
Seconds later, she declared an emergency, adding: “Declaring emergency, declaring emergency, we are in an overspeed condition.
“Descending 20,000ft per minute… we’re going to crash into the ground.”
The air traffic controller attempted to reᴀssure the crew, responding: “I’m here with you, talk to me.”
Filgueiras then reported: “We are descending 22,000ft, and we are banking 60 degrees, before her final transmission issued a desperate warning: “We’re out of time.”
In another deeply distressing moment, the pilot could reportedly be heard reciting the Lord’s Prayer just seconds before impact.
The flight had departed Austin, Texas, bound for North Eleuthera in the Bahamas, before its journey ended near West Palm Beach, according to flight tracking data.
The impact scattered wreckage across a considerable area and left a large crater in the road.
Outgoing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis described the devastation when speaking to reporters on Sunday.
“It was a cataclysmic plane crash,” he claimed.
“It looked like a missile going down and left a big crater on the side of the road.”
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
