Tech executive Adam Robinson made a chilling online post about plane crashes months before he, his wife and their two children were obliterated when the Learjet 60 jet smashed into a Florida street on Sunday.
Robinson, 44, of Texas, his wife Helen Sharp, 40, and their kids Emma, 4, and Charlie, 2, were killed instantly when the private jet plummeted almost 30,000 feet in a minute and completely disintegrated when it crashed into the ground outside of a trailer park in Palm Beach.
“You don’t need to crash a plane to learn to fly … and you don’t need VC to build a business,” the millionaire entrepreneur eerily posted on X in April.
Robinson, a former banker who ran multimillion-dollar startups, filled his social media feeds with similar words of wisdom about startup culture.
Hours before his death, he posted on LinkedIn about “fixing churn,” “leaving money on the table” and a friendly debate about the structure of his companies.
Also on board the doomed flight were Robinson’s friends Rachael Reed and Charmi Fehr, nanny Anita Maria Apellido Cetina as well as pilot Jeff Gregory and young co-pilot Nathalia Filgueiras, 20, who got her pilot’s license while still in high school.
Filgueiras can be heard screaming and pleading for help in haunting audio that recorded her final panicked moments as the plane rapidly descended.
Robinson, who was based in Austin, was founder and CEO of software companies Retention.com and RB2B.
He previously worked at Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital, according to his LinkedIn profile.
“Adam and Helen were devoted parents, and Emma, 4, and Charlie, 2, were the light of their lives,” his family shared in a social media tribute.
Their friends, Charmi and Rachael “were full of joy and adventure. They loved their people fiercely, fully and without hesitation,” the post read.
Anita Maria “cared for Emma and Charlie with tenderness and devotion, and she was truly part of the family,” the statement continued.
Helen was a ceramics artist who frequently shared videos of her works on her Instagram, as well as pictures of the couple’s two young children.
The cause of the crash, which made international headlines after the plane exploded into a fireball, remains under investigation, however the jet began falling out of the sky after it flew through temperatures as cold as -50 degrees Fahrenheit as it tried to go over a patch of bad weather.
The plane began to pick up ice and hit heavy turbulence, before it began to break up, scattering debris over a half-mile radius before it completely disintegrated on impact, authorities said on Monday.
Dramatic footage shared online shows a gaping hole in the street and debris strewn across the road, as fires raging from the crater spouted smoke into the air.
Aviation experts have speculated that thunderstorms could’ve played a role in the disaster, with AccuWeather meteorologists revealing that a quarter of an inch of rain fell per hour in the surrounding area.
The $2 million chartered flight was heading towards the Bahamas from Texas.
