LAGOS, Nigeria. (Voice Of Naija) A pilot flying the Amazon’s cargo jet that crashed at Miami International Airport, killing five people, spent nearly two minutes repeatedly warning his counterpart that they were approaching the runway too fast and never received a clear response.
The Amazon own Boeing 767-300 overran the tarmac, smashed into a van carrying airport workers, and burst into flames, new flight data released by the National Transportation Safety Board on Wednesday reveals.
According to NPR aviationthe NTSB released a summary of cockpit voice recordings that paint a picture of a critical communication breakdown in the final moments of Flight 7598.
“For nearly two minutes, one of the pilots of the Amazon cargo plane that careened off a Miami runway repeatedly warned his counterpart they were going too fast as they approached for landing and after touchdown,” NPR reports.
The fellow pilot, according to the NTSB summary, “never gave a consistent verbal response” to those warnings.
The plane, operated by 21 Air, a cargo carrier based in North Carolina contracted to fly Amazon Prime packages had departed from Luis Muñoz MarÃn International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico on Sunday afternoon.
The NTSB said the aircraft touched down awkwardly, briefly attempted to abort the landing by going around, and then barrelled approximately 1,300 feet roughly 396 metres past the end of the runway before smashing into a Ford Econoline van that contained the five workers who were killed.
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The van, which carried a crew from a plane cleaning company, was “torn apart” by the impact, NTSB Chairperson Jennifer Homendy said at a press conference on Monday, describing the scene as “utter devastation.
“The Associated Press, reporting from Miami on Wednesday, says the van had seven people on board. Five were killed. The plane then hit a compact SUV on a public road adjacent to the airport perimeter before continuing into grass and catching fire, sending a thick black plume of smoke visible for miles across Miami and more than 60 fire rescue units responded.
Homendy told reporters the plane was on its third flight of the day at the time of the crash, a detail that aviation safety experts have flagged as potentially significant, given the cumulative fatigue that multiple flight legs can produce in crew members over a single day.
Former FAA official Mike O’Donnell, reportedly told the reporters that the fact that the plane touched down on its nose and right landing gear first was consistent with an unstable approach.
“A go-around probably should have been executed sooner than that,” he said. “It seems like they hesitated.”
Both pilots survived the crash and were released from hospital. They were interviewed by NTSB investigators on Wednesday, the same day the cockpit recording summary was released.
The Miami-Dade County Sheriff confirmed on Tuesday that two other injured passengers remained in critical condition, with a third in stable condition.
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Amazon released a statement on Tuesday saying: “Our hearts and prayers are with every employee and every family whose lives have been forever changed.” The NTSB investigation is ongoing, and no formal conclusions about cause or responsibility have been released.
The core issue emerging from the NTSB data was a failure of crew communication in a high-pressure, time-critical moment is precisely the kind of cockpit resource management failure that Nigeria’s aviation regulators, the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, have repeatedly identified as a risk factor in domestic incident reports.
Nigeria has made significant investments in aviation safety in recent years, but the Miami tragedy is a reminder that even in one of the world’s most regulated aviation environments, the human factor remains the most unpredictable element of flight safety.
The NCAA and the Accident Investigation Bureau must use internationally reported incidents like this one to stress-test crew training standards at every Nigerian carrier.
