The NTSB has released the cockpit recorder readout from the Amazon Air cargo aircraft that overran a Miami runway, showing that one of the pilots called for a go-around only seconds before the plane left the pavement and crashed into a van. Five people were killed.
That detail matters now because the recorder captures the final moments before the crash in a way the first reports could not. The cargo plane, Amazon Air Flight 7598, was arriving from Puerto Rico with about 32,000 pounds of mostly contact lenses on board when it ended up off the runway and into a Ford Econoline van that was carrying seven people.
Inside the more than two hours of cockpit audio, one of the pilots warned about 1 minute and 42 seconds before impact that the aircraft was going too fast, and the speed warning kept coming up through the rest of the recording. About 30 seconds before the crash, sounds similar to the plane touching down could be heard. Roughly 15 seconds later, a pilot called for a go-around to abort the landing, but five seconds after that the aircraft had already veered off the runway.
The timing leaves the key question in sharp relief. A go-around is meant to stop a landing attempt before the aircraft settles too far into the runway rollout, yet the recorder and flight data show the crew was already dealing with excess speed as the landing continued. NTSB investigators said the throttles increased several seconds before the recording ended, consistent with go-around thrust, and brakes were reapplied and kept on until the end. But the agency said there was no indication that speed brakes or thrust reversers were deployed, leaving a gap between the call to stop the landing and the actions that might have helped slow the aircraft sooner.
The crash killed Rolando Aleman Leon, who was among the five people identified by the Miami-Dade County Sheriff's Office, and the plane’s two pilots were treated and released from the hospital. The NTSB said it expected to interview the pilots the same day it released the recorder readout, and a preliminary report is expected in the next few weeks. For now, the clearest picture is also the most troubling one: the crew appears to have realized the landing was going wrong, but by the time the go-around call came, the aircraft was already beyond the point where words alone could pull it back.
