An Amazon cargo plane barreled off a runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday, killing at least five people and injuring five others as it struck vehicles and was engulfed in flames, authorities said.
The aircraft overran the runway around 2 p.m. after arriving from San Juan, Puerto Rico, and plowed across a road used by warehouse workers and other businesses that surround the airport. Five people were killed, three critically injured and two others hospitalized with less severe injuries, Miami-Dade County officials told a news conference.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the pilots survived or those killed were all in vehicles when the plane struck.
The crash, which sent thick black smoke billowing into the sky, trapped the pilot and copilot in the cockpit and some occupants in cars, said Miami-Dade Rescue Fire Chief Ray Jadallah. The agency said crews also had to extricate a person who was trapped under a vehicle.
The crash halted flights at the busy travel hub for much of the afternoon. Some 200 emergency personnel responded, finding the plane with heavy flames and smoke from a complex engine compartment fire, the department said. Firefighters used foam from specialized airport firefighting units to extinguish the fire, and crews were still dealing with a fuel leak on the plane hours later.
The Prime Air plane came to rest beside a roadway near two semitrucks, images showed. The aircraft appeared to be resting on its belly and was largely intact despite the fire.
The cause had yet to be determined, and it was not clear if weather had played a role. Thunderstorms and wind gusts up to 30 mph (48 kph) were recorded in the area at the time, according to the National Weather Service.
The flight had been operated by 21 Air, a cargo carrier based in North Carolina. The 32-year-old Boeing 767 was originally built to carry passengers and flew for several airlines for more than two decades before being converted to a cargo plane in 2015, according to flight-tracking site Flightradar24.
More than 160 flights were canceled and nearly 325 delayed by late Sunday, according to FlightAware, a website that tracks flight disruptions. Officials from Orlando International Airport, more than 200 miles (320 km) north of Miami, said some flights were diverted there.
The National Transportation Safety Board said it was sending a team to Miami led by Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy to investigate.
Amazon said in a statement that it would cooperate with any investigation.
“We’re heartbroken to learn that five people lost their lives in today’s incident at Miami International Airport,” the company said. “Our deepest sympathies go out to the families, loved ones, and all those affected by this devastating loss.”
HUH?! That’s not what a flare is for??? I don’t think this person is a pilot at all.
For your reading enjoyment and education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_flare
And if you could point out on that page where it talks about forcing the main gear into the ground that’d be great.
Forcing the main gear into the ground is literally what flaring is.
It’s not like I’m trying to attack you I’m just letting you know what’s up with the word.
It just isn’t, the velocity vector of the aircraft intersects the runway, that’s what causes the gear to meet the runway. Flaring reduces that velocity vector to an appropriate rate for the gear. Any motion of the gear due the pitch change is purely incidental and not the principle objective of the flare.
Keep digging, you’ll hit water soon.
Flaring here is a verb, not a noun, and it might be the wrong word to use but they probably mean it as the nose catching the air, the way a flaring skirt does.
This is all just general information, I haven’t seen the video. (I have now, see edits.)
Flaring does not “force the main landing gear into the ground”, the opposite, it makes you float.
You make your approach at about a 3° glide slope. You don’t want to hit the runway like that (unless you’re landing on an aircraft carrier) so you pull up a little around 50’ (this varies significantly by aircraft size), this is called flaring. This, combined with ground effect, drastically reduces your vertical speed making you float a bit while you also bleed off horizontal speed to make a dainty little touchdown.
Not flaring as much as normal could indicate they were carrying a bit to much speed, in which case the floating part can take you too far down the runway, not leaving enough room to stop. You can (although it is definitely not best practice, especially in a large aircraft) land a little flatter, floating for less distance, taking the hard landing in return for getting your wheels on the ground and engaging the brakes and thrust reversers sooner. But there are other reasons to flare less, a strong crosswind, for example.
I don’t know what happened here, but the person quoted (if they were quoted correctly) doesn’t know what a flare is for.
Edit: I found a video, it’s not very good, I’ll keep looking. But it looks like they started a flare, but it was less of one than normal and then they dropped the nose again to about level before touching down. Which could indicate they were worried about floating too far and landing long due to their airspeed being too high and/or just poor aiming on approach and this could have led to them not having enough runway to stop due to landing too long with too much speed. Still nowhere enough information to know though.
Edit 2: Ok, after watching all the video I could find I have a guess, big emphasis on guess. In my opinion, it’s very unlikely that they would continue to attempt to land if they were that fast and/or long, they would’ve gone around, although dropping the nose after not much of a flare does indicate they might’ve been a little fast and/or long. I think there must have been at least one additional factor. My guess is there was a problem with the thrust reversers, possibly in combination with a fast and/or long landing. They might not have had time after figuring it out to call the tower while they were standing on the brakes and praying. The video after the crash I saw seems to support this; there is a good view of one engine and the thrust reverser doesn’t appear to be deployed.
It’s possible that this aircraft has a different type of engines with thrust reversers that look different, but the first picture doesn’t show anything that would indicate the deployment of any type of reverser I’m familiar with.
Edit 3: I’ve now seen more video and telemetry, and while the picture is still incomplete, some things are obvious.
Way, way, way too fast and too high previously, the speed coming, at least in part, from making a steep approach to lose excess altitude. Due to the speed and a crosswind the left main didn’t even touch down until around 3/4 of the way down the runway. That’s fucking insane, I can’t imagine why the pilots tried to complete that landing and didn’t abandon it when they were even 1/3 of the way with no expectation of being down soon. And they really should have abandoned it a couple miles out when they were too high with a quartering tailwind. It also explains the thrust reversers; until the mains are down you can’t deploy spoilers or reversers, the aircraft won’t let you. Why they didn’t in the last few seconds, I don’t know, but a malfunction seems less necessary to explain why now. Even if they were set to auto-deploy, if the left main touched down to trigger it, then came back up for a second, and it looks like that might have happened, they would have automatically stowed. Then they would have to be manually deployed, and in a situation like this I can imagine the pilots not realizing that.
If there wasn’t some emergency in the cockpit, or some other mitigating factor, I would have to guess pilot error, and an egregious one at that. With the caveat that there is much more to learn, of course. But it seems like a classic example of the pilots getting so focused on one thing, landing, that they failed to notice how much the situation was deteriorating.
Flaring is right, but the way they described its function is utterly incorrect.
Not to mention they did flare in the video.