A successful entrepreneur with roots in technology and marketing was one of nine people killed when a plane nose-dived into the ground during severe weather in Florida over the weekend, according to reports published on Monday.
Sources close to tech executive Adam Robnison, 44, confirmed he and his family were on board the doomed Leerjet private aircraft that crashed while it was en route to the Bahamas from Austin, Texas on Sunday.
Robinson, his wife and two children were among the passengers during the flight, family sources told TMZ and the New York Post. Other passengers included the family’s nanny and two close family friends.
Separately, sources said the pilot on board the airplane was 20-year-old Nathalia Filgueiras, who was certified during high school. The plane’s captain was 55-year-old Jeff Gregory, TMZ reported.
Robinson began his white-collar career on Wall Street, working for Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital in various investment-focused roles until leaving the finance industry to work in tech in the mid-2000s.
In 2012, Robinson founded Robly Email Marketing, a company that helped small businesses earn higher engagement from customers through “proprietary technologies” tied to messages sent to their inboxes.
Lessons learned from Robly Email Marketing helped him with his next venture, Get Email, which later became Retention.com. There, Robinson worked with various stakeholders to solve challenges in e-commerce and e-mail marketing by identifying anonymized website traffic and helping businesses capture e=mail addresses of retail shoppers without asking them to fill out a form.
His latest venture was RB2B, which functioned similar to Retention.com but was focused on the business-to-business and business-to-enterprise side of the industry, according to his LinkedIn profile, where he regularly engaged with more than 160,000 followers.
It wasn’t clear if Robinson and his family were traveling to the Bahamas for personal or business reasons, or a mixture of both. Aviation experts who reviewed flight and weather data said the Leerjet appeared to fly into a severe storm cell at an altitude of 35,000 feet when the plane’s crew lost control of the aircraft.
The plane was traveling more than 600 miles per hour when it slammed into the side of a street in Palm Springs, Florida, disintegrating upon impact. Dashcam footage captured by a vehicle showed the plane diving nose-down before striking the ground and bursting into flames.
Emergency officials evacuated a mobile home park while local officials worked to secure the scene and recover the plane’s wreckage. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the cause of the crash.
