Five people are dead, five more injured and a swath of Miami International Airport is “devastation” following Sunday’s crash of Amazon Air Flight 7598. There is video of the Boeing 767 widebody touching down, far beyond the threshold and careening into cars and a fence. Investigators were able to retreive and send off to the lab in Washington DC, the airplanes black boxes.

Both pilots of Flight 7598 survived along with five of the 10 people in two vehicles hit by the plane. The cargo jet appears to have landed farther down the runway than expected, with insufficient pavement remaining. It then crashed across an airport road hitting a van carrying employees from an aviation cleaning crew. It continued through a fence into a public road where it hit an SUV and several other cars.

Amazon 767 landing WAY too fast and late at MIA right before it overran the runway
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Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board described the scene as “Utter devastation.”

“You see on the paved surface, tire marks that continue through the grass. Debris everywhere. The Econoline van is torn apart. It certainly must have been devastating,” she told reporters at an afternoon briefing.

Two of the busy airports four runways are closed, triggering the cancellation of hundreds of flights. Getting the airline back to full operation will take time because cleanup and repairs of damaged navigational aids cannot begin until the site is secured.

“First of all we need to document the scene and get access to the aircraft itself. Recovering operations are continuing but it is not completely safe for our team. We have to do that before we begin our work,” Homendy said.

In short, the scene is chaotic but there’s more. Beyond the physical details, investigators may find it challenging to get a handle on Amazon’s airline operation.

More than ten years ago the company announced plans to start its airline. Today it has contracts with both cargo and passenger airlines to carry its packages. One of those agreements was with 21 Air, which was operating the flight on Sunday.

These agreements are more complicated than the PrimeAir logo painted on the side of the fuselage would suggest.

Air 21’s business is “providing flight services for customers who have aircraft but aren’t certified to run an airline,” writes Eric Kulisch, an editor with the trade publication Freightwaves.com.  If I followed him correctly, Amazon’s airline is really a network of contractual arrangements, leased airplanes from an assortment of suppliers, that are then assigned to a different collection of air operators. To make it more complicated, sometimes those operators sell unused cargo space to different companies, so that the flight is toting more than Amazon’s own cargo.

One of the eight airplanes assigned to be flown by Air 21, was Flight 7598 from Puerto Rico to Miami. Another dozen or two airplanes fly for Amazon operated by Sun Country Airlines and ABX.

Air 21 is owned by Jim Crane, who made his fortune in logistics. He also owns the Houston Astros. The Canadian company Cargojet held a minority stake in Air 21 a few years ago, during a labor dispute with its Canadian pilots and as it sought greater access to the U.S. market. But it is no longer invested in Air 21.

Jim Crane, owner of Air 21

I mention all this because the complicated business arrangements among plane owner, lessor, investors and operator reminds me of the 2004 crash of a charter flight that killed three people in Colorado including Teddy Ebersole, the teenaged son of television executive Dick Ebersole and actress Susan St. James.

The details of the two flights aren’t alike. But what the Ebersole accident revealed was that ultimate responsibility for private charter flights had been blurred as charters passed from one to another to a third company. The Federal Aviation Administration then clarified where ultimate responsibility lay when multiple entities were involved.

If this exists in the rapidly evolving world of air cargo, I can’t say. But when investigators finish in Miami and return to their desks to start sorting through the corporate paperwork for Amazon, I suspect they’ll be reminded of the Ebersole crash, too.