- Pilot Flying (PF) was the Captain, 55 yo (presumably) more experienced pilot, who only got certified to fly that type (B767) in May
- Pilot Monitoring (PM) was a 38 yo first officer, also not very experienced on B767
- PF made a number of mistakes, going too high, too fast (partially because he was descending too fast), not catching the glidescope on time
- PM was concerned that the approach/descent was abnormal but kept his mouth shut as the more experienced captain was at the controls (Edit: apparently he did speak up but PF did not acknowledge)
- PM lowered the flaps much later than required (PF orders flaps lowered and PM executes, but flaps can only be lowered when aircraft goes below certain speed) and the flaps were lowered all the way as the plane crossed the runway threshold, which likely caused plane to "float" and overshoot even further
- Plane touched down too late, and left wheel even later, which likely precluded some braking mechanisms from activating (or the PF forgot to since was busy trying to put the thing down)
- PM finally said "too fast, go around" but PF ignored him (or likely did not hear)
- In these situations PM has the right (and obligation) to take over the controls and start go around by themselves, but he didn't, presumably because the Cap was driving
- PF finally panicked and started the go around procedure, bit realized it was too late almost as the front wheel exited the runway, idled the engines and reapplied the brakes.
So, yeah...
If I try to force the captain to go around, (or follow procedures or whatever), then i am exceeding my authority and will probably be fired. Some cultures have this sort of mentality a lot stronger than others, and it has zero place in the modern cockpit.
While a captain can pull rank, they really should only ever do it with respect to the first officer if: an inexperienced first officer is trying to insist on something dangerous or forbidden by law or policy, or if the captain fully understands an FO's concerns, is fully accounting for them, and as the person ultimately responsible for safety, has determined from experience and training that the current action is safer than alternatives, and would explain but cannot explain right now for workload/emergency status reasons.
That's it, the only two reasons.
>> CVR: 00:15 A pilot called for a go-around.
>> FDR: 00:15 Brakes were released at a groundspeed of 120 knots and throttles were increased to a value consistent with go-around thrust.
>> FDR: 00:11 The throttles were reduced to idle power and the brakes were re-applied. The groundspeed was 117 knots. The throttles remained at idle, and brakes remained applied until the end of the recording.
So they decided to go-around (i.e. do not land and climb immediately, going full thrust), then 4 seconds later changed their mind and went back to power idle and brakes (unclear how speed didn't increase).
While they were still late in calling a go-around (they should have done it before being anywhere close to touching down due to their unstable approach), guessing those 4 seconds contributed to the disaster by a lot.
How can you comment as if you are knowledgeable enough about aviation to speak on this with authority, but you aren't aware that turbofan engines don't have instant throttle response and need time (up to 8 seconds) to spool up? I think a little more restraint is warranted in something like this if you don't know something that basic.
You can actually do the math to work backwards and approximate how much thrust the engines were producing during that time, which was about 15,000 lbf (vs ~120,000 lbf max thrust for a 767-300er) which reduced how quickly they were decelerating by... Maybe a few % or so. But they didn't start accelerating yet. They would have in another second or two, however.
I'll agree that they should have gone around far earlier; getting non-spurious GPWS callouts on final because you're trying to dive and find the glideslope is... Crazy, and configuring landing flaps over the numbers is also crazy, and so is landing 10-20kts faster than the highest possible Vref value for the type, and everything else. But that's fairly obvious...
This is par for the course for HN; smart people applying first-principle thinking on unfamiliar domains for about a minute, which confirms the biases of other outsiders who vote the plausible, but not-quite-right comments to the top.
The comments here during the 737 MAX MCAS thing were fucking wild. So many randoms spitting out confidently incorrect nonsense.
Barring a massive tailwind, they had enough groundspeed to go around at touchdown (158 kts).
I think we'll find throttling to G-A and then aborting the G-A caused the crash. If they'd committed to landing they at least wouldn't have overshot with that much energy. If they'd decided to G-A even at 00:15, they may have been well within margin to take back off.
Should have had a better approach; should have gone around before they even touched the ground; conditional on the bad approach and first touch, they should have gone around after the initial touch 50% down the runway. But they made the wrong choices at all of those points.
Literally 5 consecutive minutes of making 100s of wrong decisions snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
According to news reports, a magistrate judge at OSHA has been sandbagging an investigation into retaliatory firings by this airline (of pilots who reported unsafe practices with maintenance, CRM, training, scheduling, everything). I wonder if the NTSB will include that judge in the investigation. It seems like he or she has a lot to answer for.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/miami-plane-crash-21-air-safety...
This tends to be something we see in most incidents, because the cases where someone makes the right choice at one of the points tend to not become incidents.
An interesting thought is that the more obviously bad/incompetent/terrible decisions or (in)actions were involved in an incident, the better it is, because it means more things had to go wrong for a disaster to occur (more slices of cheese in the Swiss Cheese model).
Large high-bypass turbofan engines take several seconds to spool up from idle (as they would be on landing) to full thrust. The 4 seconds that the thrust levers spent in the full thrust position in this accident was not long enough.
Sadly if they had made the call earlier they were going so fast they were basically at rotation speed when they touched down so could have just pulled back and gotten into the air.
They landed flat (and the left wing refused to come down) because they tried to force the plane onto the runway. That just doesn't work. The wings are creating too much lift when you're that fast.
Disclosure: Pilot but not ATP or Jet rated.
If so, it’s tight… but i feel like they should have made it if they had stuck to that plan. They commanded full power 15 seconds before the crash, and were pretty close to (if not slightly above) their stall speed (depends on load). I suspect they just needed another 10-20 knots and enough energy to climb.
- a) Flying an unacceptably sloppy approach that put them on short final going that fast, high, and overpowered. Professionalism is being on airspeed and/or angle of attack and on glidepath . . . no excuses.
- b) Responding to a) by trying to force the jet onto the runway, when any aircrew member with half a brain should understand how badly you're going to float in ground effect when you're that fast and that overpowered. And what that's going to in turn do to your spoilers and thrust reversers that depend on weight-on-wheels before activating. Professionalism is recognizing a botched approach, swallowing your ego, and taking it the hell around.
- c) The pilot not flying sitting there like a coward and not taking the controls from the pilot flying. If someone hits a go-around criterion and isn't going around, YOU TAKE THE CONTROLS AND EXECUTE ONE. Professionalism is proper crew coordination and proper assertiveness in the cockpit.
This whole thing seems to just boil down to a complete failure of airmanship and a complete failure of professionalism all around. If I'd done that or allowed my pilot to do that, I'd expect to have had my wings pulled. If the investigation reveals more, I'll change my mind. But it ain't looking good.
When you try to land with too much energy the airplane refuses. When you get within a wingspan or two of the ground then ground effect starts giving you more and more lift. That plus excess speed means the airplane simply will not come down.
To force it down you lower the nose but that can end up castering on the nose wheel, starting a PIO event (pilot-induced oscillation), or as in this case the left wing just refused to stop flying. The "quartering tailwind" is a red herring. The jet was well within its tailwind limits - most of the wind was crosswind at that point and the tailwind contribution wasn't anywhere near enough to explain what happened. When you get above glide slope things get worse as you now need to lose altitude but that increases your speed. Even if you get the speed under control if you come at the runway with a 1700-2500fpm descent rate inertia can slam you into the runway.
They were coming in with way too much speed. They leveled off and got above glide slope because they were trying to bleed off enough speed to get within flap speed - flaps give you more drag which they desperately needed.
I made the transition this year into a much higher performance airplane and even going from a Cessna 172 to an A36 TN Bonanza the difference is stark. You must be way further ahead of the airplane in the Bonanza or you will find yourself screaming into the airport at 170kts when your landing speed is more like 80kts. And discover you are above flap and gear extension speed with all power taken out - thus without a good way to slow down.
Transport category jets are that times 100. You absolutely cannot get behind the aircraft. You plan your descents. You begin them much earlier. You pull power earlier. You add drag before speed runs away.
Above all else when you're barreling in 40kts above landing speed you call a go-around and try it again. It is way too late to fix it.
This accident started 30 minutes before they touched the tarmac. A complete failure of planning, of execution, and of ADM (to admit the problem and go-around).
You fly an approach on airspeed and/or angle of attack, and on glideslope. Period. You're either there or you're correcting to get there, and you're correcting at a point that you don't need huge oh-my-God corrections in close. If you can't do that, sucks to be you, take your waveoff like a real man or woman, and next time suck less.
I don't know anything about flying. Is this normal? Doesn't sound like it, but I don't know why the pilots would not have used these things that sound useful.
They hit the ground at 158 knots. 767-300ER rotates at 130 to 160 knots. Given it had burned through its fuel, at the moment they touched down they could have immediately taken back off and gone around.
Given the pilots braked at 146 kts, released at 120 kts to throttle up for G-A, then four seconds later ditched the G-A and re-applied brakes, this sounds like they got stuck between going around and committing to the landing and never quite did either.
I recently learned that you wash/soak the salt off before consuming it. So, are you talking pre or post wash? ;)
Here's a neat video of an accurate reproduction, including a taste test after sitting "in a ship hold" for 7 months! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tWQpJ8kR5U
Really that's all that needs to be said at the moment. They had way too much energy[1], which anyone with flight sim or RC experience will recognize as a routine mistake when hand-flying.
The question is why all (all!) the layers of checklists and warnings and process and ATC direction somehow failed in combination to prevent. Yeah, they should have aborted for sure, but they didn't, and we won't know why for a good while yet.
[1] Which can just as easily mean "too high" as "too fast", c.f. the sink rate warnings in the logs which would be consistent with trying to squeeze the airplane down onto the runway. But again we won't know without more data.
Every single thing they could do wrong at, they did.
There are just too many ways to screw up for that ever to be the case.
For instance, they could also have been lined up to land on something other than the runway they were cleared to land on -- see Air Canada Flight 759, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759, which came within 14 feet of colliding with an aircraft on the taxiway they mistook for the runway..
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1w9jsrb/put_toget...
I'm not a pilot but from my understanding there's a lot of failsafes to ensure things that slow the plane down only trigger when the plane is actually on the ground. Considering that the left gear touched down at 0:19 and pilot called for TOGA at 0:15 they didn't stand a chance.
A supportive culture encourages you to declare early at the first sign you feel something isn't right.
The fact you're struggling to decide means it should be declared but you feel some negative force if ends up not as serious as you think.
A supportive culture will work with you and if necessary down grade the priority if it can wait until a regular release cycle.
It's the same rot that set into Telstra https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49534127
From the timeline, one pilot knew they were too fast 90 seconds before touchdown.
Airlines in the US do not pressure pilots to avoid go arounds. Pilots in the US do not delegate life or death decisions to ops, especially since the FAA legally holds them accountable for that. All pilots are aware that they are responsible for the decision to go around or not.
Any airline found to be pressuring pilots to avoid go arounds would be in a world of pain with the FAA.
On cargo flights in particular timing and fuel usage are less critical than passenger flights, and a go around doesn't affect either much.
Pressure to avoid go arounds would also be incredibly counter productive since go arounds exist to preserve life and property. Pilots do go arounds to avoid costly incidents.
You are correct that the question is why they didn't do a go around, but I would bet a large sum of money that airline pressure to avoid go arounds was not a factor.
> The Amazon Prime Air Boeing 767 cargo plane that crashed off a Miami runway on Sunday, killing five people, was operated by a North Carolina company that has been accused by past employees of violating safety regulations, legal documents reveal.
There's a lot in the article, but this allegation is worth highlighting:
> Seuring's attorney, Michael Anello, told the judge that another 21 Air pilot, Johnny Salmonson, "was being pressured to fly in periods of time that were too short to comply with the proper amounts of rest, and that implicated safety. The layovers were too short."
If any of those are true, it will be very bad for the carrier, but they are not related to any of the failures being reported on.
If pilots weren't being given enough rest time, as alleged, you don't believe that might affect decision-making in the cockpit?
There have been accidents around the world where pilots were trying to save fuel, get off work at a normal time instead of 2 hours extra holding, not wanting to divert and not be home, try to get on the ground so they don’t go over their max hours for the day, etc.
Yes it’s counterproductive. *It happens*. External or internal, it happens.
Sure there have been plenty of incidents. Can you point to one in the US, with pilots flying big planes, that hasn't led to regulatory change?
Its worth pointing out that pilots are almost always paid by flight hour. In other words, they get paid more to go around.
That one did lead to major regulatory changes. It wasn't in the US though but there was an American plane involved (which was not to blame)
Note: Both planes were American. One of the carriers was not. NTSB gets involved whenever it is a US carrier OR manufacturer, so they have a ton more data than just US carrier incidents.
Take a look at Southwest's safety record. I believe they have 1 fatality due to an air incident in their history due to an uncontained engine failure that was not related to maintenance.
Also this was Amazon, not Southwest.
Construction companies in the US do not pressure employees to get shit done. Construction workers do not delegate the decisions to work in sketchy circumstances, especially since OSHA holds them accountable for all that.
See how silly that sounds?
They cook up the rules to be all compliant and whatnot and then everyone breaks them a little pretty often and in tasteful ways in order to actually get the job done. If you get caught or screw up, it's on you.
I assume this sort of pressure happens a lot less with pilots because of the cost of screw ups but there's still probably some implied pressure there.
Airlines are much more tightly bound by the FAA than any construction company is to any regulatory agency. Airlines have to get permission to let their pilots read documents off an iPad instead of paper, for example. It just isn't a good comparison to compare the most safety aware industry on earth to one famous for ignoring safety rules.
I've worked construction. I have a pilots license in multiple countries (including the US). They aren't the same.
I didn't say the same. I said the pressure was probably there too. But you can construe it as the former because that's a way easier thing to argue with.
I assume that since the NTSB database makes every single incident investigation public you can point to at least one instance where an ATP was pressured into avoiding a go around?
Can you point me to one of the specific incidents you are citing since both the new search and the old search seem to be broken for that specific term?
Edit: just to be clear: I’m not saying that companies don’t pressure transportation workers into bad decisions. My original supposition is that I have never heard of, nor would it make any sense, for a US airline to have a policy of avoiding go arounds. “Land rhe plane on the first try, or else…” is an exceptionally stupid policy.
The cockpit voice recorder transcript has the copilot repeatedly saying "we're coming in too fast" but the pilot never clearly acknolwedges.
The copilot ought to have been more assertive and said "We need to go around. NOW."
The pilot shouldn't have needed that. He should have made the call himself, but even if he was unsure, once his copilot called that he should have done the right thing.
Neither of them will ever fly again. The only question now is if either of them will go to prison. There's already a civil wrongful death lawsuit against them.
Why do you say this so confidently? Aviation generally does not have a culture of taking future employment away from people proximate to accidents.
Seems likely the FO will be fine. The CA will have some hard questions to answer.
The thing that amazes me about this is the timeline here:
00:30 The nose and right main gear touched down at a groundspeed of 158 knots.
...
00:19 The left main gear touched down at a groundspeed of 134 knots.
00:15 A pilot called for a go-around.
11 seconds and 24 knots after the nose touched down and then the left main finally also touched down? Wow. Then 4 seconds after all that the go-around. It is one thing to hold the nose off for that long, but a main mount?!
It'll be interesting to see the outcome of the NTSB investigation, they're usually quite thorough.
One of CHR's service providers was conducting hiring shenanigans and not fully, legally screening their drivers. One of the service provider's drivers hit another vehicle and crippled that vehicle's driver, who sued. CHR argued all liability should fall on the trucking company who hired the driver. The Supreme Court said no, CHR could be held liable for negligence in vetting their service provider as well, because it was ultimately CHR's load being carried.
I'm not a lawyer, but under that legal precedent, it seems Amazon might not be off the hook for damages in this case, given it was their subcontractor who was carrying Amazon cargo in a jet with "Prime Air" on the side.
From the reporting and commenting on this incident, that is not the impression I'm getting. This wasn't one bad call after getting half way down the runway, this was a continuous stream of bad decision making for the entire approach, with the copilot suggesting the pilot go around too.
Also: this kind of incident is very rare, so obviously, the vast majority of pilots don't make this mistake.
Don’t get me wrong - if I had to land that plane, I’d likely have overrun the runway too. I’m not saying it’s easy, only that it appears to me that they were operating well outside the documented parameters that are the pilot’s responsibility to know.
I just looked it up, and a 767’s Vref is 122-165kts, with Vref at max weight at 144kts. They touched down at 158kts, nose down. The approach was ~35kts over speed, they were above the glide slope, and not bleeding speed fast enough to sink - so they dropped the nose.
From what I can see, they were screwed the moment they touched down - the last moment they had a reasonable opportunity to abort was when they decided to drop the nose and commit instead.
A decent rule of thumb in aviation (and life…) is that you’re allowed to change your mind once. Waffling kills more people than switching to a bad decision does.
Those are a few situations when a trained individual could make a series of bad decisions. More so if they were forced into the situation (flying) despite raising objections. It has happened to other 21 Air pilots in the past - when they objected to flying but were forced, so who knows?
Absolutely does not absolve this individual of the incident. It’s a burden they’ll have to bear for the rest of their lives. But it could help explain why?
You don't have to extend sympathy, just as you don't have to extend sympathy to drunk drivers who kill people.
Is there anything that can be done at all here?
They have a well deserved reputation for the quality and accuracy of their incident reports, and they don't pull their punches.
I don't have sympathy. I also do know of drunk drivers that have been arrested, who are, good people. Shit happens. I'm not going to judge.
Sincerely, A former military aviator
That said, it is exceedingly difficult to find any explanation for what happened in this case that doesn’t boil down to incompetence or gross negligence.
There were so many opportunities to avoid this accident. The crew seemingly more or less single-handedly punched a hole straight through the entire Swiss cheese model. It’s so bad it’s hard to imagine they weren’t drunk at the controls.
It's also pretty rare for the NTSB to release this much information ahead of their full report. I wonder why.
Even in a case where someone has drilled themselves into a mountainside, there's value in trying to see things like "were they distracted? Was there mechanical failure? Did they have a freak medical emergency and get incapacitated? Did unexpected weather crop up?" And in other cases, it's a "but for the grace of God go I" moment where you understand how they could have made the wrong decision in good faith. Even years out of the cockpit, I'm willing to give most aviators the benefit of the doubt, because God knows I screwed up enough in my day.
But the only thing I can think of that compares to this level of negligence was the F/A-18 pilot 20 or so years ago who lost his wings after booming his non-towered hometown airport at over 500 knots and below 500 feet with absolutely zero pre-authorization or waiver from the FAA for that kind of thing.
The interaction here is eerily similar to the pilot interactions preceding the 1997 Korean Air Flight 801 (B747) disaster in Guam [1]. It's not clear based on the NTSB update if the Captain was ignoring the First Officer or the other way around.
[1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_801_-_Aircr...
Prime Air crash: 10+ mandatory go-around triggers were ignored [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650689 - September 2026
What I don't understand from his analysis though was early on he said the tail wind increased a minute before landing which is too quick to have communicated. If that's true, we need to get better about this. A minute to send a message is ages. It should be automatic between the airport and the aircraft.
https://www.wisn.com/article/amazon-cargo-plane-black-box-mi...
The left wing was lifting because they came in way too fast. 30-40 knots above final approach speed. That's why they landed so flat - if they had assumed correct flare AoA the airplane would have flown away from the runway.
This is the definition of trying to "horse it onto the runway".
Disclosure: Pilot on small GA aircraft but not ATP and not jet rated so YMMV. FWIW small airplanes are the same: if you're too fast they don't want to land. Bad things happen when you try to force them.
Wow, The Rehearsal season 2 flashbacks. Although the show was mostly pure absurdity, the central claim of crisis in cockpit communications / lack of adequate FAA mandated training around interpersonal dynamics was spot on.