Well, now... what manner of shit show thread have we here?
Indeed.
Okay, here we go, then.
Aircraft was, as we all know now, a Lear 55 and about 45 years old, of Mexican registry and operated (as all Lear 55s are) by two pilots. 55 feet long, 44 foot wingspan, max takeoff weight of about 23,000 lbs.
Departed PNE (an airport I've flown in and out of many times, including one landing as a 7700 with an in flight emergency), climbed on runway heading to about 1200' and then... not. It was airborne for about 48-53 seconds. There was no communication from the flight crew post-takeoff. Conditions at time of departure were IFR (instrument flight rules), as there was a low ceiling overcast, with rain.
There are two very critical bits of evidence that can be obtained from the Ring cam footage that's floating around. First, at least one of the engines (and likely both) were running at a high power setting upon impact. Second, the aircraft was inverted as it came down.
Engine failure on takeoff would be a very unlikely cause. Pilots are very well trained in that scenario and an engine out on a tail-engine aircraft would not cause sufficient asymmetrical thrust to make it flip over.
But something did, so we need to look at possible causes for that.
There are basically two. One is a "rudder hard over" - something that caused the rudder to deflect fully to one side. This has happened before, most notably with two 737s that went down on final approach to Colorado Springs and Pittsburg in the 90s. The rudder deflection was caused by the failure of a power control valve that had become contaminated by metal fragments. An un-commanded rudder hard over would cause a hard, accelerated turn resulting in inversion.
The other is some sort of split control surface deployment of either the ailerons or the flaps. As in, they took off with 10 degrees of flaps and then, upon retraction post-takeoff ("Gear up. Flaps up.") only one of them retracted, leaving the other deployed and resulting in an asymmetrical lift scenario, which would cause a hard, accelerated turn resulting in inversion.
A 3rd, less likely scenario is that one of the pilots commanded the turn for some reason, possibly due to disorientation. This is unlikely. Most pilots would have flipped on the autopilot as soon as the ascent was stabilized so they could focus on navigating the busy PHL airspace.
One final scenario would be airframe icing, resulting in airframe stall. This has happened many times, most recently the Colgan Air (Continental Express) crash in Buffalo in (I think) '04. Icing in this situation was basically 100% unlikely because there was no time for it to build up.
Ultimately this will be a tough one to figure out, because whatever pieces are left of the Learjet are very, very small. The media is reporting that the NTSB is looking for a CVR (cockpit voice recorder) but it's unknown if the plane had an FDR (flight data recorder) because not all non-commercial aircraft are required to have them. Aircraft for hire operate under one of several sets of FAA regulations and data capture requirements differ.
This, however, had nothing to do with Air Traffic Control and nothing to do with DEI. The odds-on probability is that this accident was due to a mechanical failure of a very old business jet registered in Mexico.
