In just 20 minutes, a Florida thunderstorm grew nearly three miles taller. Nine people died, and the coverage focused on a young woman in the cockpit instead of the warming world outside it... A little after noon last Sunday, a Learjet 60 from Texas carrying a family, their nanny, two friends and two pilots was flying across Florida at 35,000 feet on their way to the Bahamas. The co-pilot, Nathalia Filgueiras, radioed Miami Air Traffic Control Center that they had light, clear ice that was manageable with moderate turbulence and asked for permission to climb to 37,000 feet, presumably to get above the storm. About ninety seconds later, she was calling mayday and the pilot was reciting the Lord’s Prayer. The airplane went from 35,000 feet to a crater on the ground in roughly 76 seconds, and on Tuesday NTSB investigators announced they’d found most of the jet’s left elevator — part of the tail assembly that steers the plane — scattered in three pieces across 3.8 miles away from the hole in the ground. The tail had come apart in the air. While I’m not rated to fly jets, I’ve been a licensed pilot since I was 21 years old and one of the first things any flight instructor pounds into your head is that thunderstorms kill airplanes. The most dangerous ones aren’t the fully-formed ones you see on radar from 100 miles away, but the ones that are rapidly building.