Before Amazon plane crash, pilot warned of ‘excessive speed,’ NTSB says

As an Amazon cargo plane was landing at Miami International Airport Sunday, one of its two pilots cautioned that the plane was moving too fast.

The pilot first verbalized that warning roughly two minutes and 40 seconds after the plane was cleared to land and continued commenting on the “aircraft’s excessive speed” for the remainder of time captured by the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board said Wednesday. 

The other pilot did not have a “consistent verbal response” to the comments about speed, the NTSB said.

On Wednesday, the NTSB released a summary of some events captured in the cockpit of the Boeing 767 plane that overran a runway, crashed through fences and collided with two vehicles.

The crash killed five people who were in a van owned by an airline cleaning company and injured five others. Both pilots survived the crash. The plane was operated by cargo airline 21 Air on behalf of Amazon.

The NTSB also confirmed Wednesday that one of the pilots called for a “go-around,” a common tactic in aviation where flight crew abort the landing, bring the plane back up and attempt to land again if they feel they cannot land the plane safely on the original attempt.

The pilot called for the go-around attempt 15 seconds after the aircraft appeared to touch down, according to the cockpit voice recorder data. 

Five seconds after making the call, the recorder captured sounds “similar to the aircraft departing the paved surface,” the NTSB said. The recording ended 10 seconds later.

The landing and crash
Using data from the aircraft’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, the NTSB has detailed the final minutes of an Amazon Boeing 767 cargo plane as it crashed at Miami International Airport Sunday. Flightradar24, a flight tracking website, used ADS-B ground speed data to correlate the plane’s speed to those events and its location on and beyond the runway.

Sources: National Transportation Safety Board, Flightradar24, Esri, Google Map (Graphic by Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times)

‘Waited too long’

The NTSB did not release the full transcript of the cockpit voice recorder and cautioned that the information released Wednesday is preliminary and subject to change. It’s still unclear what caused the plane to crash, and it will be some time before the NTSB determines a probable cause. 

The latest update matches information the safety board previously released from the plane’s flight data recorder, which collected more than 400 data points about the fatal flight. In a news briefing Tuesday, NTSB investigators said there was no evidence the plane’s thrust reversers or speed brakes, two critical systems meant to slow an airplane after landing, had deployed. 

The flight data recorder also showed that, about 15 seconds before the end of the recording, the plane’s throttle “increased to values consistent with go-around thrust,” the NTSB’s investigator in charge of this accident Chihoon Shin said on Tuesday. 

Since the fatal crash, many aviation safety experts have wondered why the pilots continued to land the aircraft instead of performing a go-around.

In an interview Wednesday, Stephen Carbone, a former accident investigator with the NTSB, said it appeared the pilot did initiate a go-around but did so too late. 

It takes time for the engines to spool up and generate enough thrust to get the aircraft back in the air, he said. 

The pilot “waited too long,” Carbone said. “Somebody took the throttles and shoved them forward, but it was too late.”

The rest of the transcript from the cockpit voice recorder, plus interviews with the pilots, should help safety investigators understand what actions the pilots took and why, Carbone said. 

It’s too soon to know what happened but Carbone noted that the plane had an “unusual” landing, with its right landing gear and nose landing gear coming down before the left landing gear. It appeared to him that the pilot lost control of the plane. 

It’s unclear which pilot was flying at the time of the accident. 

Captain Joseph Carol, 55, and first officer Jaime Felipe Silva Molina, 37, sustained minor injuries and have been released from the hospital, according to reports from the NTSB and the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s office. 

According to the NTSB’s summary of events, the flight crew lowered the landing gear with about 2 minutes and 37 seconds left in the recording and called for the flaps to be set to 15 degrees with 2 minutes and 14 seconds remaining.

At the one minute and 4 second mark, the cockpit voice recorder first captured an electronic “sink rate, sink rate” callout, an automated warning that the aircraft is descending too fast for its altitude.  

With less than a minute to go, it captured a “too low terrain” callout, another automated warning, this time signaling the aircraft was likely not in the proper configuration for landing. At 41 seconds, a pilot called for flaps to be set to 30 degrees. 

At 15 seconds, after more automated warnings from the cockpit voice recorder, a pilot called for a go-around. Ten seconds later, the recording ended.

The plane overshot the runway by about 1,300 feet, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said at an earlier briefing.