Note, 5 November 2026

Why the crashing Learjet shows up in only two frames of the dashcam video

On 1 November 2026 a Learjet 60 flying from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas went down in Palm Beach County, Florida. All nine people aboard died; our sympathy goes to their families and friends. A dashcam caught the fall, and a comment asking "Do planes just disappear when they crash now" drew more than two thousand reactions. In that video the jet is clearly visible in only two frames. Here is why, from the flight data and the frames.

What the video shows

The dashcam looks forward through a car's windshield on a road in Palm Beach County. The jet crosses the top of the frame and is gone almost at once. We measured a copy that runs at thirty frames a second, counting from its own first frame: the jet is clearly visible in two of them. One frame shows a bright streak cut by the top edge; the next shows it at the ground edge; the one after that is a grey cloud. From the last frame with the jet to the first with fire is two frames.

We do not use any frame of the video on this site. The animation is drawn from our own measurements of it.

Why two frames is what you would expect

The jet's own broadcasts say how fast it was falling. From the ADS-B data published by adsb.lol under the ODbL, over the last 4.8 seconds it was moving about 311 metres a second along its path, about 67 degrees below the horizontal. That is a ground-frame speed, not an airspeed.

At thirty frames a second, 311 metres a second is about 10.4 metres between one frame and the next. A Learjet 60 is 17.89 metres long (Bombardier's figure for the airframe). So between two frames the jet moves about 0.58 of its own length: more than half. A thing that fast does not sit still for a camera. It shows as a streak in one frame, then it has moved most of its length by the next, then it is at the ground. Two frames is not a jet disappearing. It is a jet crossing the frame faster than the camera can draw it.

What the NTSB found

At its briefing on 3 November the NTSB said important pieces of the aircraft separated before the impact, and that whether that caused the dive or came from it, it does not know yet (NTSB briefing, 3 November). Most of the aircraft's left elevator, a control surface on the tail, was found in three pieces 1.3 to 3.8 miles from the accident site. What else has been recovered is, in its words, "almost entirely very small pieces". The jet came down steeply and hit the ground at high speed; days of rain then flooded the hole it left, slowing the recovery (CNN, 5 November).

A claim went round that the footage was faked to hide a missile. Full Fact rated it false on 4 November: the dashcam footage, the flight data and the pilot audio show an aircraft crashed. Nine people died.

What is not known

Why. The NTSB has named no cause and says it will not speculate. We do not treat the camera's burned-in clock as the time of impact; it does not share the flight data's time base. A preliminary report is expected within about a month. This note is current to 5 November 2026.

Our take

A camera is a sampler. It takes the world thirty times a second and nothing in between, so an event that crosses the frame in a tenth of that leaves two marks and a gap. The eye fills the gap with "it vanished"; the data fills it with a speed. When we build anything that watches the physical world, we size its sample rate to the fastest thing it has to catch, and we write down what it cannot resolve rather than letting a gap read as an absence. This is about how you measure a fast event, not about the cause of this accident.

About the film

Our own animation, no news footage. The two frames are rebuilt in 3D from measurements of one copy of the dashcam video, at thirty frames a second; no frame of that video appears. The jet is drawn from Bombardier's three-view, without registration or livery. The speed, the angle and the path are the ADS-B data; the map is Natural Earth data, showing the region of the debris rings, no marked point. Nothing shows the impact, fire or anyone aboard. The voice is synthetic.

Transcript

Do planes just disappear when they crash now?

In the dashcam video, the jet is clearly visible in only two frames.

The jet was diving at about three hundred meters a second.

At thirty pictures a second, that's ten meters between two pictures. More than half its own length.

One picture shows a streak. The next, it's at the ground. Then a cloud.

That's why it looks like a streak, not a plane. Full Fact rates the missile claim false.

And the wreckage? The NTSB says important pieces separated before the impact. Whether that caused the dive or came from it, it doesn't know yet.

Most of the left elevator, on the tail, was found in three pieces, one to four miles away.

The rest of the jet came down steeply, about sixty-seven degrees. The NTSB says what it has found is "almost entirely very small pieces".

Nine people died.

What will the NTSB find in the crater? Follow to see.

All notes