NOTE TO READERS:

One point I neglected to include in this post but ought to have (working too late into the night) is the limited amount of time either pilot had on the 767. The captain qualified on the 767 in May and the first officer in April of 2025, making him the more experienced pilot on this particular airplane. At age 55 the captain had 7145 hours total flight time. The first officer 2500 hours. The CVR will be discussed by NTSB today, following their interviews with the crew.

The NTSB released a video of the excursion which you will find at the end of the post.

The rundown of the last 30 seconds of the Amazon cargo flight that ran off the runway on Sunday afternoon, appears to show conflicting input on the controls, shortly after the wheels touched the pavement at Miami International Airport. While this could indicate pilot indecision about doing a go-around, the National Transportation Safety Board’s Chihoon Shin told reporters he would not make any analysis about the flight data recorder information at this point in the probe.

Nevertheless, Shin’s description of the data suggests that half way through the landing, the pilots tried to take off and quickly abandoned the effort.

Interviews with the pilots are scheduled for Wednesday. By that time, the investigation will have completed an initial transcript of the cockpit voice recorder.

The Boeing 767 touched on its nose and right landing gear at a speed of 158 knots. Seven seconds later the brakes were applied and four seconds after that, the left gear touched down at which point the plane was traveling at 134 knots. Curiously, 15 seconds, or halfway through the fatal runway excursion, the flight data recorder shows the brakes were released and the throttles moved forward to what Chin described as  a “value consistent with go-around thrust.”

Four seconds later the brakes were reapplied and throttles moved to idle where they remained until the end of the recording.

At no time during the 30 second excursion were the speed brakes or thrust reversers applied. Pressed to explain that, Shin replied, “What we noticed is the thrust reversers and the speed brakes were not deployed. We’re not going to speculate on what should have been right now.”

Amazon Flight 7598 from Puerto Rico arrived in Miami during a period of thunderstorms in the area. Video shows it touched down very far down the runway but failed to stop on the pavement, running into an airport transport van taking airplane cleaning crews to work and killing five of them.

The plane knocked down air navigation equipment and plowed through a perimeter fence, it hit a second vehicle and several Tesla robo taxies in an off airport parking lot.

The Miami Airport did not have an arrester bed at the end of runway 30 and NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said whether the airport should have overrun protective surfaces would likely be part of the investigation.

With new information that could indicate pilot indecision about whether to continue the landing, the safety board may also want to take another look at a problem that safety specialists have been warning about for more than a decade, the number of pilots who continue to landing having flown an unstablized approach.

Airlines using Flight Operation Quality Assurance data or any kind of flight data monitoring know how often their pilots do this because its recorded. One expert several years ago told me the number was about three percent of all flights. As Stuart Kipp Lau reported recently in AIN, quoting the UK Civil Aviation Authority, “an approach which is continued in an unstable condition is 80 to 100 times more likely to result in a subsequent adverse event.”

And this explains why runway excursions make up between one quarter to one third of all air accidents, another statistic that’s been stubbornly consistent for years.

https://x.com/OfficialJoelF/status/2097664940983128400/video/1