For nearly two minutes, one of the pilots of the Amazon cargo plane that careened off a Miami runway and killed five people repeatedly warned his counterpart they were going too fast as they approached for landing and after touchdown, according to flight information released on Thursday.
A summary of cockpit voice recordings compiled by the National Transportation Safety Board said the fellow pilot never gave "a consistent verbal response" to the warnings. The plane touched down awkwardly, briefly attempted to take off and then smashed into a van carrying the five victims.
The Amazon plane came in fast on Monday and then barrelled roughly 396m past the end of the runway and smashed into a van carrying workers at a plane cleaning company before hitting a compact SUV as it slid across a public road before catching fire.
All five people who died were in the van. Five others were hurt, including two who remained in critical condition on Wednesday. The two pilots survived and were interviewed Thursday by investigators.
All runways and taxiways were closed and a ground stop is in effect, an airport spokesperson said. (Source: Supplied)
Pilots had time to correct or abandon their landing
At the point when the pilot first called out the plane was speeding, former FAA official Mike O'Donnell said the crew could have done a number of things to slow it down, including extending the spoilers, cutting the throttles and lowering the landing gear. Or the pilots could have just aborted the landing at that point and circled to try again.
"You have plenty of time to slow down, plenty of time to say, let's just do a go-around at two minutes out," said O'Donnell, who used to oversee airport safety and crash investigations.
Plane was unsteady as it approached the ground
Information from the flight data recorder that was released late Wednesday shows how unsteady the plane was as it came in to land amid strong winds, and then the pilots briefly disengaged the brakes and shoved the throttles up as if they were trying to take off again and retry the landing. But they abandoned that just four seconds later.
The cockpit audio recordings also captured a series of automated warnings from the plane about the speed of descent and the approaching terrain. O'Donnell said those terrain warnings reinforce that the plane was unsteady and suggest it may not have been configured correctly for landing.
The Amazon plane was well down the runway when its right and nose landing gear first touched down, reducing how much distance the plane had on the runway ahead of it to stop. Strong winds at the airport as storms moved in may have created a tailwind that helped propel the plane forward. Tracking site Flightradar24 estimated based on the NTSB data that the plane was nearly halfway down the 9360-foot runway when it first touched down.
The full transcript of the cockpit conversation won’t be released until later in the investigation.
Experts question how well the pilots worked together
Several experts have said the pilots should have aborted that landing while the plane was still in the air and circled around to retry it.
Former airline pilot and safety expert Steve Arroyo said the details released Wednesday show a lack of teamwork in the cockpit and suggest the pilot at the controls may have been too focused on the landing to acknowledge the speed warnings.
"Where's the coordination? Where's the leadership here in terms of managing the flight deck? And following the trained guidelines set forth in the company’s flight manual?" Arroyo questioned.
Mary Schiavo, who is a former Inspector General of the Transportation Department, said she wonders if the pilot at the controls was the more senior captain while the less experienced first officer called out the warnings “and the junior pilot was not aggressive in challenging”.
Investigators will consider everything that may be a factor
The 32-year-old Boeing 767 was originally built to carry passengers and flew for several airlines in foreign countries for more than two decades before being converted to a cargo plane in 2015, according to flight-tracking site Flightradar24.
The final flight was operated by 21 Air, a cargo carrier based in North Carolina that has been flying packages for Amazon since 2024.
The jet’s ownership history, weather conditions at the airport, maintenance records and operations by 21 Air were expected to be reviewed by NTSB investigators.
It's the second crash of a cargo jet in the US in less than a year. A UPS plane crashed after losing its engine while accelerating down the runway at Louisville’s Muhammad Ali International Airport in October. The crash killed all three pilots and 12 people on the ground. Twenty-three more were injured.
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