Pilots' push to level jet may have torn off key piece found miles from Florida crash, former NTSB expert says

Federal investigators found a key piece of the private jet that crashed in Florida on Sunday broken apart and scattered miles from where the plane went down.

The Learjet 60 took off from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport around 10:37 a.m., headed for North Eleuthera Airport in the Bahamas. Just before 1 p.m., it went down in Palm Beach County, killing everyone aboard.

Investigators recovered a part that controls the plane's pitch in three separate pieces, one of them nearly four miles from where the Learjet 60 went down.

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Investigators recovered the left tail elevator, a "very important piece of evidence," National Transportation Safety Board member Thomas B. Chapman told reporters Tuesday.

Chapman said that pieces of the left tail elevator were found anywhere from 1.3 to 3.8 miles away from the crash site, explaining that it likely separated from the plane before crashing. Investigators will study it to determine whether losing the part helped bring the plane down or whether forces acting on the aircraft tore it loose.

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Investigators hope to have access to the crater by Wednesday, which is currently blocked off and being worked on by public utility crews.

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Former NTSB investigator Greg Feith told Fox News that the debris points to an in-flight breakup, possibly caused by one of the pilot's efforts to try and level the jet and over-stressing its structure.

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"One of the clues here is that there was an in-flight breakup and that a critical flight control, as the board member said, did come off in flight," said Feith. "You can see that the airplane leveled off at about 8,000 feet for a very short period of time. That may have been one of the pilots trying to control the airplane, level the airplane, and in doing so over-stretched the structure of the aircraft, causing those parts to fail and come off."

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"They're close to the main impact, which says that those parts came off at a very low altitude," he added.

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Austin tech entrepreneur Adam Robinson, 45, his wife, Helen Sharp, 40, and their children, Emma, 4, and Charlie, 2, were among the nine people killed, along with the children's nanny, Anita Maria Cetina, and couple Rachael Reed and Charmi Fehr, according to their families. The plane's captain, Jeff Gregory, 55, and copilot Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras, 20, also died.

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Weather conditions have been identified by federal investigators as a "major focus" of the probe, after the crew reported icing and moderate turbulence at approximately 35,000 feet shortly before the aircraft experienced a rapid loss of altitude.

The jet was equipped with a cockpit voice recorder, but investigators haven't found it and can't yet confirm it was on board when the plane went down, NTSB officials said.