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.”
The plane never really landed. It was filmed flying down the runway with one gear still in the air because it was going too fast, generating a ton of lift. Without that gear on the ground, thrust reversers won’t deploy and brakes will be significantly less effective.
There are two main questions for the investigation to answer: Why was it going so fast and why did the crew not execute a go-around. Time pressure may be a component of both answers, but we won’t know until the report comes out.
If you have more info here, I’d be happy to hear it. I don’t know shit for dick about flying or planes. What else can you tell us?
Edit: My tone might be a little sassy. I’m sorry, it is an earnest question. I’m genuinely curious.
Two main systems slow a plane down on the ground when landing. One is brakes, which work just like on a car, including having ABS. Those, obviously, only work when the plane is solidly on its wheels.
The second is the thrust reversers. These make the engines push in reverse. They work by mechanically deflecting the thrust forward. This would be incredibly dangerous in the air, so they are linked to sensors in the wheels that prevent them from activating until weight is detected on all the wheels. They also take time to move, which means that you can’t stow them again and regain speed to take back off once they activate, commiting you to your landing.
A plane has to come in fast enough to still be flying while going slowly enough that they can decelerate enough to no longer be flying once their downward momentum goes away. In this case, video clearly shows them flying down the runway without all their wheels on the ground, which means they were going fast enough for lift and gravity to cancel out. Without all their wheels on the ground, brakes won’t do much and reversers won’t activate.
To add a wrinkle to this, recall that once reversers activate you are committed to the landing. If you know you are fast and don’t have a ton of extra runway length to use, you are likely going to tell them to activate the moment you touch the ground so that you can have them slowing you down for as long as possible. This makes fast landings doubly dangerous since you have to take an action that prevents escape before you have time to assess whether escape is needed. If they don’t actually activate, you could still move the lever back and take off again, but instinct is going to tell you that’s no longer an option.
There is a concept in aviation called a ‘stabilized approach’ which basically says that you are done preparing all systems for landing, are within an extremely narrow margin of the ideal approach slope, and are within a narrow margin of the ideal speed. In commercial transport aviation (planes you’d fly on) policy universally states that if any of the three requirements are not met, the pilots must abort the approach without attempting to land. This makes sure that pilots don’t put the plane in a situation where they are attempting to land too fast. Cargo carriers are much less strict about enforcing this.
I’d highly recommend watching some videos from a YouTube channel called Mentour Pilot. It’s excellently produced breakdowns of aviation incidents that explain exactly what happened to cause the incident. Mechanical failures, disoriented pilots, etc. They then talk about what has changed to reduce the likelihood of a similar incident happening again. Every video is a self-contained narrative that includes every piece of information you’d need to understand it.
I didn’t know reverse thrusters were a thing. I thought that a plane just had flaps, kind of like the lower feathers on the wing of a bird. That’s usually what I see when a plane is landing. But I guess that does make sense.
That is extremely helpful to know, thank you. I’ll give them a watch.