The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released the initial data extracted from the black boxes of the Amazon Prime Air plane that crashed last Sunday at Miami International Airport after skidding off the runway during landing.
The preliminary investigation reveals that the aircraft touched down at high speed: 158 knots, approximately 182 miles per hour. It was also confirmed that one of the pilots alerted about the situation and that the crew attempted to abort the landing just seconds before the accident.
"The plane was coming in at excessive speed, the pilots were having trouble controlling the aircraft," stated Telemundo 51 Pablo Rojas, an aviation law expert.
When the plane was approaching the runway, one of the pilots repeatedly alerted his colleague that they were going too fast, and at the last moment, he requested to abort the maneuver. According to the NTSB, the cockpit voice recorders contained over two hours of high-quality audio and did not capture any "coherent verbal response" from the other pilot to those warnings.
As they descended, several automatic alerts about the speed and low altitude were heard in the cabin.
The recorder also captured that when the aircraft began to brake, the brakes were released and engine power increased. Shortly after, one of the pilots requested to maneuver to take off again. A few seconds later, the engines reduced power and the brakes were activated again.
A finding that has captured the attention of experts is that there is no evidence that the crew deployed the airbrakes or thrust reversers, two systems specifically designed to slow down the aircraft during landing.
"We don’t yet know if that was a choice made by the pilots, or if those systems were not functioning, or perhaps they were not armed to engage automatically, which can also happen. Those are the kinds of details that we still do not know," said lawyer Rojas.
"It is unclear whether there was a mechanical failure, for instance, of the aircraft, and the pilots were responding to some mechanical issue, or if it was simply a pilot error. Typically, in these accidents, when we investigate them, there are multiple causes, not just one," he noted.
In addition to the analysis of the black boxes, the investigators interviewed both crew members.
The chairwoman of the NTSB, Jennifer Homendy, explained that the agency wanted to hear the pilots' account first before releasing the full transcript of the voice recorder.
The pilot, Joseph Carroll, 55 years old with 7,145 flight hours, and the first officer Jaime Felipe Silva Molina, 37 years old with 2,655 hours, suffered minor injuries and were discharged before meeting with investigators.
The crashed plane was a Boeing 767-300, manufactured in 1994 and operated by the cargo airline 21 Air under contract for Amazon Prime Air. The flight had departed from Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
After exceeding the runway by about 396 meters, the aircraft crossed a perimeter fence and struck a van belonging to the contracting company Professional Ocean Service Corporation, which was carrying seven cleaning workers.
The accident claimed five lives, who were traveling in the van. They were all of Cuban origin: Rolando Alemán León (55 years old), Yoel Rodríguez Naranjo (53), Julio C. Pineda (75), Carlos Acosta Fajardo (53), and Javierkys Reyes Quevedo (47).
Parallel to the investigation, the widow of Yoel Rodríguez Naranjo, Yaraisi Santiso Morejón, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in the Miami-Dade County court against Amazon Inc., Amazon Air Cargo, 21 Air LLC, and the two pilots, citing potential crew errors, inadequate training, and the use of a 32-year-old aircraft.
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