tldw, per Blancolirio: unstable approach, crew should have done a go around at 1000 agl but did not attempt one until it was too late, then aborted the go around.
I think the real question is why didn't the pilots do a go around. I bet there are underlying pressures from the airlines and/or amazon to not do a go around to avoid schedule delays or fuel costs.
Airlines in the US do not pressure pilots to avoid go arounds. Pilots in the US do not delegate life or death decisions to ops, especially since the FAA legally holds them accountable for that. All pilots are aware that they are responsible for the decision to go around or not.
Any airline found to be pressuring pilots to avoid go arounds would be in a world of pain with the FAA.
On cargo flights in particular timing and fuel usage are less critical than passenger flights, and a go around doesn't affect either much.
Pressure to avoid go arounds would also be incredibly counter productive since go arounds exist to preserve life and property. Pilots do go arounds to avoid costly incidents.
You are correct that the question is why they didn't do a go around, but I would bet a large sum of money that airline pressure to avoid go arounds was not a factor.
> The Amazon Prime Air Boeing 767 cargo plane that crashed off a Miami runway on Sunday, killing five people, was operated by a North Carolina company that has been accused by past employees of violating safety regulations, legal documents reveal.
There's a lot in the article, but this allegation is worth highlighting:
> Seuring's attorney, Michael Anello, told the judge that another 21 Air pilot, Johnny Salmonson, "was being pressured to fly in periods of time that were too short to comply with the proper amounts of rest, and that implicated safety. The layovers were too short."
Southwest airlines had a culture of turning around fast at the gate. So maybe no explicit policy but culture can drive unintended consequences and decisions.
Fast gate turnarounds have nothing to do with what happens in the cockpit. That affects the cleaning crews.
Take a look at Southwest's safety record. I believe they have 1 fatality due to an air incident in their history due to an uncontained engine failure that was not related to maintenance.
In one of the videos you can see dark clouds behind the plane. I suspect the pilots knew they'd have to divert to a different airport if they couldn't land and put pressure on themselves to not have to do that.
I suspect the pilots knew it wasn't a great approach but it just didn't click how bad it was. They just felt committed to the approach and thought they could 'fix it' without realizing how bad things really were. Having good enough situational awareness that you wave off when you are supposed to generally means that you also aren't wildly off speed/other parameters. They clearly had lost situational awareness.
The thing that amazes me about this is the timeline here:
00:30 The nose and right main gear touched down at a groundspeed of 158 knots.
...
00:19 The left main gear touched down at a groundspeed of 134 knots.
00:15 A pilot called for a go-around.
11 seconds and 24 knots after the nose touched down and then the left main finally also touched down? Wow. Then 4 seconds after all that the go-around. It is one thing to hold the nose off for that long, but a main mount?!
The branding on the plane is Prime Air, but it's not actually Amazon owned and run. Instead it's a cargo airline (21 Air) that they contract with to operate cargo flights with Prime Air livery on the planes.
It'll be interesting to see the outcome of the NTSB investigation, they're usually quite thorough.
CH Robinson, though, just lost a lawsuit at the Supreme Court with similar premises. They are a freight forwarder and third-party logistics outfit that contracts large amounts of capacity with subcontractors (airlines, trucking companies, shipping lines, etc.) and sells a complete package to their clients.
One of CHR's service providers was conducting hiring shenanigans and not fully, legally screening their drivers. One of the service provider's drivers hit another vehicle and crippled that vehicle's driver, who sued. CHR argued all liability should fall on the trucking company who hired the driver. The Supreme Court said no, CHR could be held liable for negligence in vetting their service provider as well, because it was ultimately CHR's load being carried.
I'm not a lawyer, but under that legal precedent, it seems Amazon might not be off the hook for damages in this case, given it was their subcontractor who was carrying Amazon cargo in a jet with "Prime Air" on the side.
Yep, its also the most intuitive way to reason about it when you look at the data. Unfortunately, a bad call. I'm sure many of us would have made the same mistake.
> I'm sure many of us would have made the same mistake.
From the reporting and commenting on this incident, that is not the impression I'm getting. This wasn't one bad call after getting half way down the runway, this was a continuous stream of bad decision making for the entire approach, with the copilot suggesting the pilot go around too.
Also: this kind of incident is very rare, so obviously, the vast majority of pilots don't make this mistake.
Private pilot here. No, I'm quite sure very few of you here would have made the same mistake as evidenced by the fact that literally hundreds of thousands of aircraft land successfully every day, many of them under much more adverse conditions. This is not a oh-it-could-have-happened-to-anyone kind of screwup, this is a did-this-guy-really-go-through-basic-pilot-training kind of screwup.
> There was no indication in the recorded data that speed brakes or thrust reversers were deployed.
I don't know anything about flying. Is this normal? Doesn't sound like it, but I don't know why the pilots would not have used these things that sound useful.
The lack of contact of the left wheels on the ground, which the Weight of Wheel sensor deployment depends on, as in both wheels being grounded, which the auto-speed brakes/thrust reversers depend on, worsened the whole situation as the crew seems to be unaware why they weren't losing speed after they'd 'landed'.
Every single thing they could do wrong at, they did.
> Every single thing they could do wrong at, they did.
There are just too many ways to screw up for that ever to be the case.
For instance, they could also have been lined up to land on something other than the runway they were cleared to land on -- see Air Canada Flight 759, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759, which came within 14 feet of colliding with an aircraft on the taxiway they mistook for the runway..
Take this with all the salt that random third-party guesses about a still-in-investigation event should be taken with -- think fully salt-cured ham -- but it looks like the landing was with a quartering tail wind, and the upwind (left) gear never really got weight on it; the wheel bogie needs to be straightened by weight against both the front and back wheels to register weight-on-wheel, and the auto-brake systems need positive weight-on-wheels from at least one redundant sensor on each of the three gear to engage. Came down hot, and basically skimmed with one wheel partially off the ground for some, most, or all of the way down the runway, preventing the braking systems from kicking in.
Really that's all that needs to be said at the moment. They had way too much energy[1], which anyone with flight sim or RC experience will recognize as a routine mistake when hand-flying.
The question is why all (all!) the layers of checklists and warnings and process and ATC direction somehow failed in combination to prevent. Yeah, they should have aborted for sure, but they didn't, and we won't know why for a good while yet.
[1] Which can just as easily mean "too high" as "too fast", c.f. the sink rate warnings in the logs which would be consistent with trying to squeeze the airplane down onto the runway. But again we won't know without more data.
The Boeing 767 does not have a Flaps 40 setting. The "Forty" callout was an automated annunciation of the radar-altimeter measured altitude above the runway.
Every bit of data that comes out here makes the crew look worse and worse. There’s just no excuse for the sheer incompetence and terrible decision making that was on display.
I know an airline pilot that said this is far worse that one could have even imagined. Standard procedure would be a go around the second the first cockpit warning sounded about the unstable approach.
Sorry if I’m strong but this was not an honest mistake or even a series of honest mistakes. This is “how were these folks allows to fly this plane?” bad.
I've been watching the Flying for Money videos on this. He has interesting insight. It's a bit disappointing he just threw the data into an LLM for processing since it doesn't seem that hard to process, but otherwise he's been pretty good at bringing up likely possibilities based on Occam's razor. Mostly around negligence and most recently about junior vs senior pilot shyness vs ego.
What I don't understand from his analysis though was early on he said the tail wind increased a minute before landing which is too quick to have communicated. If that's true, we need to get better about this. A minute to send a message is ages. It should be automatic between the airport and the aircraft.
tldw, per Blancolirio: unstable approach, crew should have done a go around at 1000 agl but did not attempt one until it was too late, then aborted the go around.
I think the real question is why didn't the pilots do a go around. I bet there are underlying pressures from the airlines and/or amazon to not do a go around to avoid schedule delays or fuel costs.
I've never heard of anything even close to this.
Airlines in the US do not pressure pilots to avoid go arounds. Pilots in the US do not delegate life or death decisions to ops, especially since the FAA legally holds them accountable for that. All pilots are aware that they are responsible for the decision to go around or not.
Any airline found to be pressuring pilots to avoid go arounds would be in a world of pain with the FAA.
On cargo flights in particular timing and fuel usage are less critical than passenger flights, and a go around doesn't affect either much.
Pressure to avoid go arounds would also be incredibly counter productive since go arounds exist to preserve life and property. Pilots do go arounds to avoid costly incidents.
You are correct that the question is why they didn't do a go around, but I would bet a large sum of money that airline pressure to avoid go arounds was not a factor.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/miami-plane-crash-21-air-safety...
> The Amazon Prime Air Boeing 767 cargo plane that crashed off a Miami runway on Sunday, killing five people, was operated by a North Carolina company that has been accused by past employees of violating safety regulations, legal documents reveal.
There's a lot in the article, but this allegation is worth highlighting:
> Seuring's attorney, Michael Anello, told the judge that another 21 Air pilot, Johnny Salmonson, "was being pressured to fly in periods of time that were too short to comply with the proper amounts of rest, and that implicated safety. The layovers were too short."
Southwest airlines had a culture of turning around fast at the gate. So maybe no explicit policy but culture can drive unintended consequences and decisions.
Fast gate turnarounds have nothing to do with what happens in the cockpit. That affects the cleaning crews.
Take a look at Southwest's safety record. I believe they have 1 fatality due to an air incident in their history due to an uncontained engine failure that was not related to maintenance.
Turnaround at a gate and a life-or-death go-around judgement are two entirely different operations governed by entirely different sections of the FAA.
Also this was Amazon, not Southwest.
In one of the videos you can see dark clouds behind the plane. I suspect the pilots knew they'd have to divert to a different airport if they couldn't land and put pressure on themselves to not have to do that.
I suspect the pilots knew it wasn't a great approach but it just didn't click how bad it was. They just felt committed to the approach and thought they could 'fix it' without realizing how bad things really were. Having good enough situational awareness that you wave off when you are supposed to generally means that you also aren't wildly off speed/other parameters. They clearly had lost situational awareness.
The thing that amazes me about this is the timeline here:
00:30 The nose and right main gear touched down at a groundspeed of 158 knots.
...
00:19 The left main gear touched down at a groundspeed of 134 knots.
00:15 A pilot called for a go-around.
11 seconds and 24 knots after the nose touched down and then the left main finally also touched down? Wow. Then 4 seconds after all that the go-around. It is one thing to hold the nose off for that long, but a main mount?!
Bingo.
Could a company that won't let delivery drivers stop to pee possibly be pushing their pilots that hard? Yes. Yes, they could.
Jeff Bezos must have every dollar to pay for his wife's grotesque plastic surgery Mar-a-Lago face.
If people die in the process, that's regrettable but its a sacrifice he is willing to make.
The branding on the plane is Prime Air, but it's not actually Amazon owned and run. Instead it's a cargo airline (21 Air) that they contract with to operate cargo flights with Prime Air livery on the planes.
It'll be interesting to see the outcome of the NTSB investigation, they're usually quite thorough.
CH Robinson, though, just lost a lawsuit at the Supreme Court with similar premises. They are a freight forwarder and third-party logistics outfit that contracts large amounts of capacity with subcontractors (airlines, trucking companies, shipping lines, etc.) and sells a complete package to their clients.
One of CHR's service providers was conducting hiring shenanigans and not fully, legally screening their drivers. One of the service provider's drivers hit another vehicle and crippled that vehicle's driver, who sued. CHR argued all liability should fall on the trucking company who hired the driver. The Supreme Court said no, CHR could be held liable for negligence in vetting their service provider as well, because it was ultimately CHR's load being carried.
I'm not a lawyer, but under that legal precedent, it seems Amazon might not be off the hook for damages in this case, given it was their subcontractor who was carrying Amazon cargo in a jet with "Prime Air" on the side.
Obligatory Blancolirio link: https://youtu.be/dcf7n0T3D9c
The "hazardous attitudes" study in this report will be gold.
"Capitalism caused this crash"
Yep, its also the most intuitive way to reason about it when you look at the data. Unfortunately, a bad call. I'm sure many of us would have made the same mistake.
> I'm sure many of us would have made the same mistake.
From the reporting and commenting on this incident, that is not the impression I'm getting. This wasn't one bad call after getting half way down the runway, this was a continuous stream of bad decision making for the entire approach, with the copilot suggesting the pilot go around too.
Also: this kind of incident is very rare, so obviously, the vast majority of pilots don't make this mistake.
Private pilot here. No, I'm quite sure very few of you here would have made the same mistake as evidenced by the fact that literally hundreds of thousands of aircraft land successfully every day, many of them under much more adverse conditions. This is not a oh-it-could-have-happened-to-anyone kind of screwup, this is a did-this-guy-really-go-through-basic-pilot-training kind of screwup.
> There was no indication in the recorded data that speed brakes or thrust reversers were deployed.
I don't know anything about flying. Is this normal? Doesn't sound like it, but I don't know why the pilots would not have used these things that sound useful.
The lack of contact of the left wheels on the ground, which the Weight of Wheel sensor deployment depends on, as in both wheels being grounded, which the auto-speed brakes/thrust reversers depend on, worsened the whole situation as the crew seems to be unaware why they weren't losing speed after they'd 'landed'.
Every single thing they could do wrong at, they did.
After applying the brakes for 8 seconds, they then went to full throttle to try get back in the air for four more seconds. That's bonkers.
> Every single thing they could do wrong at, they did.
There are just too many ways to screw up for that ever to be the case.
For instance, they could also have been lined up to land on something other than the runway they were cleared to land on -- see Air Canada Flight 759, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759, which came within 14 feet of colliding with an aircraft on the taxiway they mistook for the runway..
Take this with all the salt that random third-party guesses about a still-in-investigation event should be taken with -- think fully salt-cured ham -- but it looks like the landing was with a quartering tail wind, and the upwind (left) gear never really got weight on it; the wheel bogie needs to be straightened by weight against both the front and back wheels to register weight-on-wheel, and the auto-brake systems need positive weight-on-wheels from at least one redundant sensor on each of the three gear to engage. Came down hot, and basically skimmed with one wheel partially off the ground for some, most, or all of the way down the runway, preventing the braking systems from kicking in.
AIUI, they should never have gotten that far. They should have gone around at 1000 feet.
> Came down hot
Really that's all that needs to be said at the moment. They had way too much energy[1], which anyone with flight sim or RC experience will recognize as a routine mistake when hand-flying.
The question is why all (all!) the layers of checklists and warnings and process and ATC direction somehow failed in combination to prevent. Yeah, they should have aborted for sure, but they didn't, and we won't know why for a good while yet.
[1] Which can just as easily mean "too high" as "too fast", c.f. the sink rate warnings in the logs which would be consistent with trying to squeeze the airplane down onto the runway. But again we won't know without more data.
Depending on the plane they need the wheels to have sufficient weight on them first. Also strangely the flaps 30 and flaps 40 call outs do not match.
The Boeing 767 does not have a Flaps 40 setting. The "Forty" callout was an automated annunciation of the radar-altimeter measured altitude above the runway.
Every bit of data that comes out here makes the crew look worse and worse. There’s just no excuse for the sheer incompetence and terrible decision making that was on display.
I know an airline pilot that said this is far worse that one could have even imagined. Standard procedure would be a go around the second the first cockpit warning sounded about the unstable approach.
Sorry if I’m strong but this was not an honest mistake or even a series of honest mistakes. This is “how were these folks allows to fly this plane?” bad.
apparently they weren't even properly configured until almost touching down.
I've been watching the Flying for Money videos on this. He has interesting insight. It's a bit disappointing he just threw the data into an LLM for processing since it doesn't seem that hard to process, but otherwise he's been pretty good at bringing up likely possibilities based on Occam's razor. Mostly around negligence and most recently about junior vs senior pilot shyness vs ego.
What I don't understand from his analysis though was early on he said the tail wind increased a minute before landing which is too quick to have communicated. If that's true, we need to get better about this. A minute to send a message is ages. It should be automatic between the airport and the aircraft.
Related:
Prime Air crash: 10+ mandatory go-around triggers were ignored [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650689 - September 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm6G7EOP5Qc