All five people who died were in the van. Five others were hurt, including two who remained in critical condition on Tuesday. The two pilots survived and were interviewed Wednesday by investigators.
At the point when the pilot first called out the plane was speeding, former FAA official Mike O’Donnell said the crew could have done a number of things to slow it down, including extending the spoilers, cutting the throttles and lowering the landing gear. Or the pilots could have just aborted the landing at that point and circled to try again.
“You have plenty of time to slow down, plenty of time to say, let’s just do a go-around at two minutes out,” said O’Donnell, who used to oversee airport safety and crash investigations.
Information from the flight data recorder that was released late Tuesday shows how unsteady the plane was as it came in to land, and then the pilots briefly disengaged the brakes and shoved the throttles up as if they were trying to take off again and retry the landing. But they abandoned that just four seconds later.
The cockpit audio recordings also captured a series of automated warnings from the plane about the speed of descent and the approaching terrain. O’Donnell said those terrain warnings reinforce that the plane was unsteady and suggest it may not have been configured correctly for landing.
The Amazon plane was well down the runway when its right and nose landing gear first touched down, reducing how much distance the plane had on the runway ahead of it to stop. Strong winds at the airport as storms moved in may have created a tailwind that helped propel the plane forward. Tracking site Flightradar24 estimated based on the NTSB data that the plane was nearly halfway down the 9,360-foot runway when it first touched down.
Several experts have said the pilots should have aborted that landing while the plane was still in the air and circled around to retry it.
The 32-year-old Boeing 767 was originally built to carry passengers and flew for several airlines in foreign countries for more than two decades before being converted to a cargo plane in 2015, according to flight-tracking site Flightradar24.
The final flight was operated by 21 Air, a cargo carrier based in North Carolina that has been flying packages for Amazon since 2024.
The jet’s ownership history, weather conditions at the airport, maintenance records and operations by 21 Air were expected to be reviewed by NTSB investigators.
It’s the second crash of a cargo jet in the U.S. in less than a year. A UPS plane crashed after losing its engine while accelerating down the runway at Louisville’s Muhammad Ali International Airport in October. The crash killed all three pilots and 12 people on the ground. Twenty-three more were injured.
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