Five people are dead after a cargo plane carrying Amazon’s Prime Air logo ran off the end of a runway at Miami International Airport Sunday afternoon and slammed into a field full of parked and passing vehicles. Five more people are in the hospital, three of them critical.
The plane was a Boeing 767-300, 32 years old, flown by North Carolina-based 21 Air under contract to Amazon as Flight 7598. It had left San Juan, Puerto Rico that morning and was coming in on Runway 30, which runs more than 9,000 feet, a little before 2 p.m. The video from the scene shows something odd: The plane appears to just hang there, well beyond where it should have landed. And when the main gear finally makes contact, the rear left wheel keeps bouncing instead of settling onto the pavement. Flightradar24 tracking put its speed at almost 130 mph by the time it ran out of runway. It didn’t stop there. It tore into an open field next to the airport and hit several vehicles near Northwest 42nd Avenue before it came to rest.
Whether the people who died were on the plane or in those vehicles hasn’t been confirmed. Nobody’s released the names yet, either. Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Sunday evening that five people were hospitalized, three critical, two less severe.
Both pilots ended up trapped in the cockpit.So as some of the people who were in the cars that were hit. They were freed with the help of specialized rescue equipment and, by some accounts, close to 200 firefighters. As the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Chief Ray Jadallah said he got there and saw heavy smoke and flame around the engines, the kind of fire that doesn’t go out fast. Crews used aircraft firefighting foam and they were still working on the a fuel leak for hours later. Search and rescue teams worked through the wreckage checking for anyone else, while paramedics sorted through who needed to go to the hospital first.
In one instance the Virginia Gardens Mayor Spencer Deno said his house shook. He told CNN he grabbed his keys within a minute of hearing the impact and drove toward the sound of the sirens with his wife, stopping about a block from home once it was clear how bad it was.
Airport operations basically stopped. All runways and taxiways closed right after the crash, and the timing couldn’t have been much worse, Labor Day weekend, one of the busiest stretches for air travel all year. FlightAware had tracked more than 450 delayed or canceled flights by Sunday night. Two of the airport’s four runways reopened by around 5 p.m., though the airport stayed under the ground delay program, and with the plane still sitting there, officials figured that the mess would carry into Monday. The inspectors didn’t find any debris on the actual runway, but the plane tore up navigation equipment when it left the pavement.
The FAA and NTSB are both looking into it. Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, is expected to send a team to the area, and the board is expected to hold a briefing Monday. “Typically, planes land at a slower speed and closer to the start of the runway than this one seems to have done,” said David Soucie, a CNN safety analyst and former FAA inspector. “So investigators will probably begin to look into why the plane floated so far down the runway before touching down, why it was still going so fast, and what was going on with the weather and the crew in the seconds before impact.” The aircraft landed at the airport in dismal weather but it is not yet known if that was a factor.
Amazon put out a statement from spokesperson Kelly Nantel saying the company was heartbroken over the five lives lost, with condolences to the families. 21 Air’s CEO, Keith Winters, said the crash left the company devastated and that they’re cooperating fully with the investigation, adding that right now the priority is supporting the people affected and making sure the public gets accurate information as it comes in, not before.
Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz confirmed the plane went off the end of Runway 30 before it hit the field, and her office responded alongside fire rescue.It’s the kind of accident that requires almost all agencies at once. Deputies from the sheriff’s office are responsible for traffic and scene security, fire crews are responsible for the aircraft and the injured.
There’s no quick answer coming on what actually caused this. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will review data from the cockpit voice recorder and the flight recorders, review the maintenance history of this particular aircraft at 21 Air, compare the weather to what the pilots would have experienced on approach and review the air traffic control communications leading up to the landing. Investigators have said they are not yet ready to rule out whether this was the result of a mechanical problem, a weather factor, pilot decision-making or a combination of all three. If the NTSB pattern holds, this kind of discovery is usually months away, sometimes longer for a complex matter.
County officials are now working to treat the injured, console the families of the dead and get one of the busiest airports in the Southeast back in business. Emergency personnel were still working at the scene until the sun set Sunday.
Airport officials said they’d keep working with the airlines through the week on rebooking and delays tied to the closed runway and the wreckage still sitting on airport grounds.
It’s worth remembering this is Amazon’s branding on the plane but not necessarily Amazon running the flight day to day. While Amazon’s name will be the one most people associate with the crash, the FAA and NTSB will be looking closer at 21 Air as this moves forward, as it’s one of several cargo carriers that fly under contract for Amazon’s Prime Air network.
This story is developing.
The names of the people who died haven’t come out, the condition of the two pilots pulled from the cockpit hasn’t been confirmed publicly, and the cause of the crash won’t be known for a long time. The details that are public to date have come primarily from witnesses, flight tracking data and a handful of officials who spoke at a news conference on the night the plane went down. Some will almost certainly change as the investigation are still on going.
