Tom Camp 🇺🇸

Here’s my take as a 32 year airline pilot: The female on the radio was not the flying pilot, she was the first officer (copilot) because the person working the radio when the airplane was in cruise and looking for a different altitude was the same one making the call during the emergency. The non-flying pilot is the one that works the radios. the flying pilot is the one at the controls. Though I don’t know for sure she also sounded like she was fairly inexperienced, but I’m not sure if that played any role in the accident at all. She complained about moderate turbulence plus or minus 700 feet and that tells me that they were either in severe turbulence, (not moderate) though they said it was moderate, or they were in a “wave”. Waves aren’t that big a deal usually She also complained that they were picking up precipitation at 30+ thousand feet which is strange. Then suddenly they were in a 10,000 foot per minute descent. Which further accelerated to 20,000 ft./min. decent. It ended up in a spiral dive. So, with all that, my theories are that: they picked up asymmetric ice, which caused the airplane to enter into a spiral dive. (Not likely) Or they got into severe turbulence suddenly and had a structural failure, whereby the horizontal stab may have malfunctioned or even broken off, which would’ve put them in a nose down uncontrollable dive. There is a possibility that they also got a tail stall as a result of ice accumulation on the tail, which could’ve put them into a dive situation as well. It is very strange to be over 36,000 feet, plus -700 gains and altitude and picking up precipitation all at the same time. She said it was -47 was the outside to air temperature which is strange to be picking up precipitation, but then again it is Florida so who knows it could be warm enough up there that they got precipitation. But my bet is structural failure Very very sad. Heart wrenching. As a pilot it’s hard to listen to.