Pilot warned of excessive speed before Miami cargo plane overran runway
NTSB flight data shows one pilot cautioned the other repeatedly, with no consistent reply, as automated sink-rate and terrain warnings sounded. Five people on the ground were killed.
One pilot warned the other repeatedly that their aircraft was flying too fast in the minutes before an Amazon cargo plane overran a Miami runway and killed five people on the ground, according to flight data released by American investigators.
The National Transportation Safety Board's update on the crash of Amazon Prime Air Flight 7598 says one pilot cautioned the other multiple times about "the aircraft's excessive speed", and that "there was not a consistent verbal response" from the other seat — a pattern the summary says continued "throughout the remainder of the recording", even as an altitude alarm sounded in the cockpit.
What the recorder captured
The Boeing 767-300 came in at a landing speed of 158 knots, or 292km/h, which aviation specialists have described as at the high end for the type.
Two automated warnings fired in the final minutes. One was a "sink rate sink rate" callout — the system telling the crew the aircraft was descending too quickly. The other was a "too low terrain" alert, which sounds when a plane is close to the ground without being configured to land.
The NTSB released the aircraft's speed and altitude together with flap deployment data and a summary of what the two pilots said to each other. Flaps sit on the trailing edge of the wing and are extended to let an aircraft fly slowly enough to touch down under control.
That detail is where an aviation lawyer who reviewed the update sees a problem.
"The flap deployment here happened much later in the accident sequence," Pablo Rojas told CBS News, the BBC's US partner. "That's maybe because the pilots were responding to the fact that they were going too fast."
Rojas was careful about the limits of what has been published. Without the actual cockpit recording, he said, it is hard to know precisely what the NTSB meant by an inconsistent verbal response. His conclusion from the data was blunter.
"But, it really confirms that this was, in a way, a doomed approach," he said.
The path the aircraft took after the runway ended
The sequence after the overrun is set out in unusual detail, and it explains why the deaths happened on the ground rather than in the air.
The aircraft struck equipment on the ground first. It then hit a white Ford van, carried on through a perimeter fence, collided with a Toyota Corolla, and came to rest roughly 1,300ft — about 394m — beyond the end of the runway.
The five people killed were a plane-cleaning crew travelling in the van. Miami authorities named them on Tuesday as Rolando Aleman Leon, 55; Yoel Rodriguez Naranjo, 53; Julio C Pineda, 75; Carlos Acosta Fajardo, 53; and Javierkys Reyes Quevedo, 47. A further five people were injured.
Why an overrun is not a simple mistake
An aircraft that arrives faster than intended has less runway left in which to stop.
What makes this update notable is the human element recorded alongside the numbers. A crew member identified the problem, said so more than once, and the response was inconsistent. That is a description of a breakdown in the cross-checking that two-pilot operation exists to provide — and it is the sort of finding that tends to shape an investigation's eventual recommendations more than any single instrument reading.
The late flap extension fits the same picture. If the crew were still trying to shed speed on short final, deploying flaps late is what that looks like on a data trace, and it is a consequence of the speed problem rather than an independent fault.
What has not been established
The NTSB has not said what caused the aircraft to be fast in the first place, and its update is an interim publication rather than a finding. No probable cause has been issued, and the board has not apportioned responsibility between the crew, the aircraft, the approach or the conditions.
The actual cockpit voice recording has not been released — only the NTSB's written summary of it. That distinction matters for how much weight the "inconsistent verbal response" line can carry: it is the investigators' characterisation, not a transcript the public can read.
Nor has the board addressed the question that will matter most to the families of the five men who died: why a vehicle carrying a ground crew was in the path an overrunning aircraft would take. Neither the placement of the van nor the layout beyond the runway appears in this update.
The board has not said when it will report. What the data does establish is a narrow, uncomfortable fact: the aeroplane was going too fast, at least one person in the cockpit knew it and said so, and it was not enough.
