Investigators recover cockpit voice recorder from fatal Learjet crash site

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board have recovered a cockpit voice recorder from the primary crash site where a Learjet collided with a busy roadway in South Florida last week and killed all nine people on board.

Investigators were searching for the device as part of a larger search of the crash site to get more insight into what led the plane to crash in Palm Beach County, Florida, on Nov. 1.

Investigators will now try to see if the recorder is working and if any audio was captured.

While the cockpit voice recorder is one of the many pieces of the larger puzzle in what happened, it could give valuable information about what happened in the last moments before the plane tumbled out of the sky.

The cockpit voice recorder is being evaluated in the NTSB Vehicle Recorders Laboratory in Washington, D.C., the NTSB said, adding the excavation work at the impact site is now complete.

Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the NTSB, had previously asked anyone who found or recovered debris from the crash to contact the agency so they could retrieve it. "Recovering all available wreckage is critical to the investigation and helping to determine the cause of the crash," she said in a post on X.

In the January 2025 crash of a medical evacuation jet in Philadelphia, investigators were able to recover the cockpit voice recorder but determined it had not worked for several years.

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