Investigators recover cockpit voice recorder from fatal Learjet crash site

By Taylor Romine, CNN

(CNN) — 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, killing 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 November 1.

Investigators will now try to see whether the recorder is working and whether 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, which can be crucial to the investigation, is being evaluated in the NTSB Vehicle Recorders Laboratory in Washington, DC, the agency said, adding the excavation work at the impact site is now complete.

Iinvestigators in the January 2025 crash of a medical evacuation jet in Philadelphia were able to recover the plane’s recorder, but determined it had not worked for several years.

Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the NTSB, repeated Monday that 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.

The warning comes after investigators found another crucial piece of evidence miles from the crash site – a majority of the jet’s left elevator, the part of the tail that helps pilots control whether the nose tilts up or down. Three of the pieces were found between 1.3 and 3.8 miles from the crash site, NTSB member Tom Chapman said last week.

The distance of where it was found compared to the crash site shows it broke away before the plane hit the ground, but it’s not yet clear whether it caused the plane to dive or if heavy force caused the breakaway, he said.

Weather is also a factor for the NTSB’s investigation as scattered storms were moving across the region at the time of the crash, officials previously said. One of the pilots told air traffic control in an unworried tone that ice was forming on the plane but was manageable, and that turbulence was throwing the craft up and down by about 700 feet.

Shortly after that communication, the crew reported precipitation and asked to climb to 37,000 feet, which the controller approved. Less than 30 seconds later, something went wrong and the plane plummeted. Investigators are looking to see if the weather contributed to the crash, they previously said.

Investigators will also be looking at the plane’s maintenance history, the decisions made in the cockpit and by air traffic control and the procedures of the pilots.

The NTSB is expected to release a preliminary report in about a month, investigators said last week, but settling on a probable cause will take one to two years, an agency spokesperson told CNN.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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CNN’s Aaron Cooper and Alaa Elassar contributed to this report