Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker and other officials view the aftermath of a fatal small plane crashed in Philadelphia, Monday, Feb. 3, 2025. Associated Press

PHILADELPHIA — The cockpit voice recorder was not working on a medical transport plane that killed seven people when it plummeted into a Philadelphia neighborhood in January and likely had not been functioning for several years, the National Transportation Safety Board said in a preliminary report Thursday. The NTSB also confirmed Thursday that the crew made no distress calls to air traffic control. A ground warning system that may contain flight data memory is still being evaluated by the manufacturer, the agency said.

The medical transportation plane plummeted into a residential and commercial area within a minute of taking off from Northeast Philadelphia Airport and erupted into a fireball on the evening of Jan. 31. Officials said the crash killed all six people aboard the Learjet 55 and a seventh person who was inside a vehicle on the ground. At least two dozen others on the ground were injured, including a 10-year-old boy in a vehicle who was hit by debris while trying to protect his sister.

Former NTSB Chairman Jim Hall called the finding about the cockpit recording “disturbing” because “that and the whole flight data recorder are important to find out what went wrong.”

“It’s a significant loss of important information that should have been there,” Hall said. He noted that the lack of any distress call shows that the emergency occurred too quickly for the crew to communicate with the tower.

Those on the plane included an 11-year-old girl who had been receiving medical treatment at Shriners Children’s Philadelphia hospital. Jet Rescue Air Ambulance said the plane had been taking Valentina Guzmán Murillo and her 31-year-old mother, Lizeth Murillo Osuna, home to Mexico.

Messages seeking comment were left with Jet Rescue on Thursday. The company had previously identified its team members aboard as Dr. Raul Meza Arredondo, 41; the captain, Alan Montoya Perales, 46; the copilot, Josue de Jesus Juarez Juarez, 43; and paramedic Rodrigo Lopez Padilla, 41. All four were from Mexico.

According to the report, the recorder was recovered eight feet underground after the plane crashed and had significant damage, including exposure to liquids. After extensive cleaning and repairs, the agency discovered the 30-minute tape did not have any audio of the flight.

The high-impact crash destroyed or badly damaged more than a dozen homes and business, and left debris from the plane scattered across a wide area nearly 500 yards long and 300 yards wide.

Former NTSB investigator Jeff Guzzetti said the loss of any cockpit recordings would make the agency’s work more difficult, but not impossible. He hoped the ground warning system will be able to provide some data, while wondering why the cockpit voice recorder had not been inspected regularly.

“I really think that puts a black mark on this Mexican operator, for not ensuring that their cockpit voice recorder was operating,” Guzzetti said. “The NTSB, I think, will still be able to come to a probable cause, just because they’re really good at extracting circumstantial evidence.”

Guzzetti, a lead NTSB investigator on John F. Kennedy Jr.’s fatal crash near Martha’s Vineyard, believes the Philadelphia crash has some of the same hallmarks of a pilot suffering from “spatial disorientation” in dark or cloudy skies.

That occurs, he said, when pilots lose their bearings, don't trust their instruments and turn, sometimes repeatedly, in a misguided attempt to correct course. The Learjet in Philadelphia, he noted, “came screaming out of the sky — and it did some turns too — and again you see those same types of turns in the JFK Jr. accident.”

“The human body can play tricks on you, and that’s why you have to be incredibly vigilant as a pilot and trust your instruments,” he said. “But, you know, it’s not to say that there couldn’t have been some sort of distraction in the cockpit too that occurred during that time.”

Several victims on the ground have retained law firms to represent them in potential lawsuits, including a man who spent 11 days in an intensive care burn unit after his SUV became engulfed in jet fuel as he drove home from work.

The crash was among a series of recent aviation disasters and close calls that left some people worried about the safety of flying. It came just two days after an American Airlines jet and an Army helicopter collided in midair in Washington, D.C. — the deadliest U.S. air disaster in a generation.