MIAMI — Flight data suggest an Amazon cargo plane tried to abort an unsteady landing at Miami International Airport before smashing into a van and killing five people inside, according to information investigators released Tuesday.
National Transportation Safety Board investigators will interview the pilot and co-pilot on Wednesday as they try to determine why the jet overran the runway while landing Sunday.
NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said at an evening news conference that they are reviewing flight data and cockpit recordings to figure out what happened in the seconds before the aircraft slammed into the van on airport property, careened through a fence and then smashed an SUV on a city street.
Homendy said investigators want to talk to the pilots before releasing anything from the cockpit voice recorder about why they appeared to briefly attempt to perform a go-around to retry the landing approach before abandoning that and trying to stop the plane. She said the data showed the thrust reversers were never used to help stop the plane.
The five people killed were all inside a van used to shuttle crews that clean planes, authorities said.
Five other people were injured. The pilot and co-pilot have been released from the hospital, Miami-Dade County Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz said Tuesday. Two people remain in critical condition, while a third is in stable condition, she said.
Both the mangled white van, its entire front end crushed, and the SUV — so badly damaged it was nearly unrecognizable — remained at the crash site Tuesday, along with the jet, which sat nose-down with a large soot mark near the P in “Prime Air.”
Expert says the pilots may have hesitated
The Amazon jet was landing after a two-hour flight from Puerto Rico as storms brewed around the Miami airport. The NTSB said the plane barreled roughly 1,300 feet (396 meters) past the end of the runway.
Former FAA official Mike O’Donnell said Tuesday the fact that the plane landed on its nose and right landing gear first demonstrates this was an unstable landing. He said the pilot might have been attempting a go-around.
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“A go-around probably should have been executed sooner than that. And it seems like they hesitated,” O’Donnell said.
O’Donnell said that by the the time the crew tried to abort the landing, it may have been too late if there wasn’t enough runway left. But the interviews investigators scheduled with the pilots for Wednesday will reveal more about what they were thinking at that moment.
Aviation attorney Mary Schiavo, who once was the Transportation Department’s Inspector General, said “it almost seems like there was a disagreement between the pilots on what to do.”
The weather could have also been a factor because experts said it appeared a strong tail wind propelled the plane far past the point where it was supposed to land. Investigators will want to know what the pilots were told about the weather and why air traffic controllers had not flipped the approach to the runway to allow the plane to land into a headwind.
All the people killed were in a cleaning service van
Amazon said in a statement that it is cooperating with the investigation and the company’s deepest sympathies go to the victims and their families.
The five people killed were all in a van owned by Professional Ocean Service Corp., a company that cleans planes. The company said it wouldn’t comment on the crash out of respect for the families who lost loved ones.
“Our employees are far more than the people who work beside us each day, they are family, and they are deeply loved. Our hearts and prayers are with every employee and every family whose lives have been forever changed,” the company said in a statement Tuesday.
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The Miami-Dade sheriff identified the deceased as Rolando Aleman Leon, 55; Yoel Rodriguez Naranjo, 53; Julio C. Pineda, 75; Carlos Acosta Fajardo, 53; and Javierkys Reyes Quevedo, 47.
Homendy said the crash raises safety concerns for workers at airports. “This is certainly very tragic. You would not think riding in a van to clean an airplane, that this would happen,” she said.
Miami doesn’t have a special system to stop runaway planes
Homendy has said that investigators will look at whether the lack of a special system to slow and stop speeding jets at the end of Miami’s runways could have been a factor in the crash. But other experts say the airport complied with FAA requirements to provide a cleared buffer space of at least 1,000 feet (305 meters) past the end of the runways.
Miami is not one of the more than 120 airports in the U.S. with lightweight, crushable material that the Federal Aviation Administration says has saved around 500 lives.
Homendy said her agency’s goal is to prevent tragedies, but thousands of runway excursions have continued to happen. The NTSB’s final report will identify the cause and make recommendations to prevent it from happening again, but that likely won’t be complete until a year or more from now.
The jet started as a passenger plane before converting to cargo
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 in foreign countries for more than two decades before being converted to a cargo plane in 2015, according to flight-tracking site Flightradar24.
The Miami airport regained the use of a third runway Tuesday evening after the NTSB released it, but investigators are still documenting the evidence around the wreckage at the end of the runway the jet landed on.
More than 225 flights were canceled Sunday and Monday, and hundreds more were delayed, officials said. But that should improve now that the airport can use three of its four runways.
Homendy said the NTSB will try to release the runway back to the airport as quickly as possible after investigators document the scene.
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