Clips posted to social media depicting the deadly crash showed an aircraft nearly vertical slamming at high speed into the ground, creating a large fireball and leaving a flaming crater near a busy roadside.
“Today’s plane crash in Palm Beach County, Florida, is a horrific tragedy,” US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said, confirming that all nine people on the aircraft were killed.
Duffy said the plane, a Learjet 60, had departed from Austin, Texas, and was headed for the Bahamas.
The crash occurred near Cresthaven, a neighbourhood in Palm Beach County that is less than 11 kilometres from Trump’s resort home Mar-a-Lago.
“Obviously this is a cataclysmic plane crash,” Florida governor Ron DeSantis said near the scene.
“It looked like a missile going down,” he said, adding there were no reports of anyone on the ground being injured.
Trump had been at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday but departed from the nearby airport shortly after he boarded Air Force One at 11.55am, about an hour before the crash.
In an audio recording posted to air traffic website liveatc.net, someone in the cockpit can be heard reporting “moderate turbulence” and saying the crew was “managing the ice”.
The person said the plane was “picking up precipitation” and needed “to climb” shortly before saying: “Mayday, mayday, we’re descending 10,000 feet per minute”.
Seconds later, the person said they were “declaring an emergency” as the plane descended 20,000 feet per minute.
“We’re going to crash into the ground,” the person said, shortly before communications stopped. (AFP)
