Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) interviewed the captain and first officer of the Amazon cargo plane that went off the runway on Sunday at Miami International Airport, resulting in five deaths and several injuries, reported Telemundo 51.
The investigator in charge of the case, Chihoon Shin, explained why interviews with the pilots are essential for the investigation: "What we need to do is talk to the crew and get their account to understand how they were handling the controls, in order to better grasp the situation. We need that information; it is a key piece."
Shin added that they have more than two hours of useful audio from the recordings of the cockpit. However, this is not sufficient on its own.
"The accounts and interviews with the crew will help us fill in some gaps about actions the crew remembers and may have taken but did not verbalize. That is something we need to fully understand before analyzing what happened with the power levers in this case," he said.
Who are the crew members of flight 798 of Prime Air?
The crew members are Joseph Carroll, 55 years old, and the first officer Jaime Felipe Silva Molina, 37, who sustained minor injuries in the accident and had been discharged from the hospital before appearing before the investigators.
Carroll resides in Colorado and works for the cargo airline 21 Air, based in North Carolina, according to his LinkedIn profile. Silva Molina lives in South Florida, according to public records.
The chairwoman of the NTSB, Jennifer Homendy, revealed in a press conference that Carroll had accumulated 7,145 flight hours as of March 31, while Silva Molina recorded 2,655 hours as of August 13.
Both were crew members of Prime Air flight 798 for Amazon on board a Boeing 767-300 manufactured in 1994, which had departed from Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Upon landing on runway 30 in Miami, the aircraft overshot the end of the pavement, traveled about 396 meters beyond the runway, and struck a van belonging to the contractor Professional Ocean Service Corporation, which was transporting seven cleaning workers, as well as a civilian utility vehicle located outside the airport perimeter.
A witness identified as Abraham Altamar, who worked at a nearby warehouse, lent his phone to one of the pilots so he could call his wife after the accident. "He was trembling, he was in shock. One of my colleagues asked him, 'What happened?'. And he mentioned something about the brakes," Altamar recounted.
This reference to the brakes gains significance in light of the preliminary data from the flight recorder, which does not show evidence of the deployment of the air brakes or thrust reversers, two key systems for slowing down the aircraft during landing.
The records also suggest that the crew briefly attempted to execute a power-on maneuver—aimed at aborting the landing and retrying the approach—before giving up and trying to brake the aircraft.
A video from a witness captured one of the crew members jumping out of the cockpit door of the burning plane and running away.
Deceased and lawsuits
In the accident there were five fatalities - Rolando Alemán, Yoel Rodríguez Naranjo, Julio C. Pineda, Carlos Acosta Fajardo, and Javierkis Reyes Quevedo - who were traveling in the van. Three more individuals were transported in critical condition to a trauma center.
At the same time as the investigation, the widow of one of the deceased Cubans filed a lawsuit against Amazon, while other family members of the victims hired legal representation.
The NTSB has indicated that it will not release the content of the cockpit voice recorder until it has heard the complete testimony of the pilots, in order to avoid having the technical data influence their statements.
The formal investigation, which includes the analysis of both black boxes in the Washington laboratory, could take several months.
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