NTSB issues investigative update on B-767 runway excursion accident in Miami
ntsb.govA few observations to add context (partially stolen from PPRuNe):
- 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...
This is the spitting image of old pre-CRM thinking:
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.
This seems like a no win situation for the subordinate pilot. Grabbing the wheel of an aircraft while landing must have its own set of risks. We also only hear about the times when the subordinate pilot didn’t prevent a crash. Never hear about the times they were mistaken and did nothing.
He doesn’t need to “grab the wheel”. Simply saying “go-around” would have been enough, it’s highly highly unlikely that the captain would have ignored that.
lol! OP writes:
PM finally said "too fast, go around" but PF ignored him (or likely did not hear)I don’t see this in the official CVR transcript from the NTSB. Only mention of “around” is the go-around called on the ground, 15s before CVR stopped
Yes I was wrong. Looking at the transcript that go-around call out was likely from the PF; that's where the data recorder indicates the brakes were released the throttle set to max for the go-around (and go back to braking only 4 sec later).
Still, the PM notified PF that they were going too fast many times during the approach. All warnings were ignored.
“Go around. My controls.”
Four words said by the pilot monitoring that any pilot flying will understand and react automatically to.
Thanks, I was wondering why they would be using Salesforce in the cockpit
A pilot friend once told me that the Tenerife crash was a turning point for this sort of thing. I believe that was the origin of CRM training.
The ~"positive" side of that, the UA flight 232 disaster is often noted as an event that demonstrated the effectiveness of CRM as a strategy.
Is this legislated, required policy, or is this something that you believe should be the case?
The reason I ask is, case in point, do you think the PM is going to be penalized in some way?
I don't think there's a law mandating it, but CRM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management) has been used and trained by all major airlines since the 1980s. The reason is simple: it doesn't really help to have two people in the cockpit if only one of them is making all the decisions.
And all Military air forces AFAIK. The military of course also takes rank very seriously, but there was existing understanding that Mother Nature doesn't give a shit about rank and so CRM makes sense in that same practical vein.
Also, you'll see that says "Crew" not just "Cockpit". Turns out that from the cockpit of an airliner you've not always got the best possible view of the problem. If the steward who has no idea how to fly a plane insists it's the right engine that is on fire, her input is valuable, from back where she's serving customers with coffee she can see the engines, the fire is on the right, whereas you're just looking at sensor outputs and you were maybe about to turn off the left engine.
It was instituted after Tenerife where hundreds died because of this exact same problem.
I'm pretty sure it's FAA policy, but not 100% on that.
I don’t think it’s required, but my friends who do flights for remote mining operations in SE Asia use the same concepts — so it really is pretty standard for commercial flying, even down to remote private operations.
A bad bump on a commercial plane can be hundreds of thousands to millions in damage + downtime + inspection/repairs. And tens or hundreds of millions if you wreck a big plane. Companies may be evil, but most would still prefer you waste $2k in go around fuel than $200k because you decided to set it down badly or $20M+ because you drove their plane off the runway.
> Pilot Monitoring (PM) was a 38 yo first officer, also not very experienced on B767
But importantly, the first officer had almost a year more experience in the 767, which sets the stage for an almost textbook imbalance: having to speak up to someone senior to you, someone older and with more overall experience, but less direct experience in the airplane they are flying
Other comments talk about The Rehearsal Season 2, which is spot on. The FAA of course had dismissed the idea that there needed to be any special focus on training pilots to speak up, saying it's already under the umbrella of CRM (crew resource management)
> - 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)
This was exactly what season 2 of The Rehearsal was all about. It also had one of the most jaw-dropping IRL plot twists in its last episode. I highly recommend it.
I read several years back that most of the time when an accident happens the copilot knew something wrong was happening but wasn't willing to override the cap. This is a cultural change rather than procedure.
There have been big changes over the decades on that but the counterfactual is also that you could imagine lots of crashes from confusion in the cockpit during critical times if two pilots are working towards cross-objectives or are more occupied communicating to eachother than just doing what one person said needs to happen.
IANAP but it's hard to imagine that the many mistakes the Pilot Flying apparently made were related to unfamiliarity with the type. They just all seem so, so, so basic.
One more thing worth noting is that they flew through bad weather on the approach, which led to the deviation from the glideslope. But the actual issue IMHO is not going around when they noticed that the approach was wildly unstable, or at the latest when they noticed that they were going to touch down with very little runway left.
It's one of those situations where any one risk not occurring probably would have ended up with no excursion but all risks present at the same time made this outcome.
It wasn't bad weather. Captain was going way too fast to begin with, and started descent later than needed. So he needed to catch up with the glide/descent slope by making the plane descend faster. Thus gaining even more speed. He still arrived too late (overshot the beginning of the runway), with higher speed (I think 30 kts over the limit) and not configured (flaps not down).
It was really, really, really sloppy approach. And all could have been corrected just by executing go-around literally at any point in time up to 10 sec before he did. Both pilots still would have their careers, and those 5 people would still be alive.
There's even a song!
There was clearly bad weather in the area. What you said is just tangentially related facts.
Exactly the situation The Rehearsal season 2 was about.
And just to ice the cake, after they crashed and caught fire, PF jumped out of the window and abandoned PM to burn.
I wonder: would PM have taken control if they had more experience on the 767?
Having pilots fighting over the controls is not a situation anyone wants. The pilot monitoring saying go around should have caused an immediate reaction, the human factors behind why it didn't will probably feature prominently in the post-accident actions.
If any of the two pilots feel uncomfortable about the approach, they are actually drilled to just order a go-around, not politely ask and hint that they would prefer to do it like this FO did (wastes time). Ideally the pilot flying should then do it, but if they don't, the pilot monitoring can also take control (while clearly stating "my controls, going around") and do it. One major issue that I bet the NTSB will note in the final report is that both pilots were relatively new to the aircraft and to the airline, usually it's preferable to pair an inexperienced FO with more experienced captains.
(not an aviation expert, just summarizing various bits and pieces I gathered from various YouTubers over the last days)
Also not an expert, I wonder if there's some rule where a "Go around!" order has precedence over any other activity anyone in the cockpit wishes to perform.
As a passenger I had my first go around a few days ago, but we were 5km away from the runway.
I experienced my first go-around a few months ago, in an A321 that was landing in Tampa.
The clouds had been very thick for awhile. The plane was making those weird low-and-slow vibes that it makes on final approach.
We popped out of the clouds and there was a highway with cars! A huge parking lot! (An airport, too? Certainly, but I didn't really see a runway or any runway-adjacent stuff.) To my inexpert eyes, we just looked to be impossibly low for our location.
The folks in the cockpit apparently didn't like what they saw with their eyes, either. In an instant, the engines roared as they simultaneously pointed the thing upwards. My little pea brain was very impressed by the immediacy of the forces on my body as we disappeared back into the clouds after what was at most just several seconds of visibility.
Anyway, it was very clear that there was no hesitation to the go-around. However that decision was reached, it was then simply executed.
The next attempt went very smoothly about ten minutes later.
(The go-around can be seen here, if anyone wants to have a look at some pretty lines and maps from ADS-B: https://planefinder.net/data/flight/NK630/history/5-48596475 )
It totally does. Every approach briefing includes instructions on what they will do in the event of a missed or unstable approach. The procedure is generally full throttle, nose up, gear up, retract flaps, head in the direction briefed, and notify ATC. All automatic from memory.
When either pilot calls for a go-around, both are supposed to drop literally everything else, execute the go-around without delay or hesitation, and then pause to analyze the situation once ATC gives them a heading and altitude or holding pattern to regroup.
The only thing lost in a go-around is fuel and time. Any sane airline will never punish a call to go-around if done so in good faith.
(I fix airplanes, have been in aviation for 15 years)
Yes, it does. I can't speak universally but I would generally expect it to be a written rule, if not then at least it's the expectation.
Isn't it? Pretty sure its actually the drilled and trained commandment. If you doubt, speak up, and if that fails, take control. [0]
There are a lot of things which are drilled and trained which have gone wrong in this incident.
Including the complete failure of the FO to act assertively, order a go-around, and to take the controls when it was clear the captain was not responding appropriately.
If this had happened and the captain had fought over the controls and still caused an accident, we’d be having a very different conversation. The FO would be lauded as a hero who fought to save the lives of those on the ground.
> The pilot monitoring saying go around should have caused an immediate reaction
Is there evidence that PM ever called for a go around? I mean earlier, when it would have actually been possible, not 15 seconds before the end of the flight data recording.
From what I've heard, PM stated (repeatedly) that they were too high and/or too fast, and PF was not heard to respond.
“My controls” is something every single pilot has heard since day 1 of training and has a learned, immediate response to.
The power dynamic in training is obviously very different during training where the instructor is pilot in command.
Making the assumption the PM could have taken control cleanly if the power dynamic was so poor that they weren't able to demand a go-around seems iffy, typical stabilised approach gates are 500ft in VMC, with an aircraft travelling 3nm a minute, 40 seconds before touchdown.
But as I said, the human factors involved will be a huge focus of the accident investigation.
My response was to your point about “fighting over the controls”, as if there would have been a tug of war on the yoke as the FO tried to wrest control of the plane from the captain which is nonsense.
If anything, it would have been yet one more opportunity to avert catastrophe and perform a go-around. Pilots are trained for this, and it makes less than zero sense for a PM to fail to take the controls from a PF who is flying unsafely over some imagined fear of a battle for control while the plane jostles around hurtling toward the ground. The PM is obligated to do this by every written regulation.
If you have never actually been behind the controls of an aircraft, please just stop trying to confidently assert things about this subject.
Wouldn't be a case of "if I fix it then there was nothing wrong"? How do you, as an inferior rank, step in to correct something that you think is going to happen? Imagine the inferior officer steps in and lands the plane, wouldn't the superior officer say well duh that's what I was doing why did you intervene? It's an interesting conundrum, I think, and may exacerbate the reaction or lack thereof..
linked elsewhere in this thread: CRM is standard practice aboard airplanes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management
Your comment doesn't answer my question.
> Having pilots fighting over the controls is not a situation anyone wants
Nor crashing and killing 5 people.
The PM got his rating about 18 months ago. The PF only got his this past May. The PM had more overall hours, but this is looking a lot like a skills issue. He was flying an unstable approach. He wasn't configured for landing.
This pairing, considering past incidents with similar airframe vs. total hours disparity, really does look to be bad practice. You've got to acknowledge the human psychology. Part of it is probably the crazy pipeline over the past few years where people are racing to 1500 hours no matter how they log them, or they're getting on restricted certs with lower hours.
I really don't think time in this particular type is a factor. None of what I've heard or read has anything to do with familiarity with its unique systems. Everything sounds like sloppy flying. Sounds like he, the PF/PIC/Captain, started the descent late, stayed too high, didn't manage the power curve well, landed long and fast and willfully ignored his first officer. One bad decision after another where instead of properly correcting it or making the safe decision to try again he decided to plow onwards.
The training pilots go through to get type rated and to be allowed to fly by airlines is incredible. But knowledge is one thing, attitudes and behavior and truly taking safety to heart outside the sim is another. I bet this guy was slightly reckless in every model he's flown.
Another alternative is external social factors acting on the captain. Maybe he was distracted by personal issues. There again though, if you're not fit to fly that day, you call out.
This isn’t a skill issue, it’s laziness and negligence.
The details of course matter; but the overarching principle put on stark display here is that if you don’t meet stabilized approach criteria (on-speed, on-glidepath, minimal necessary flight control deflections) at the 1000 ft AGL gate, go around. Yes grey areas exist but this approach never became stabilized. The whole approach was a missed opportunity to go around.
I am a pilot; and although I don’t fly large transport category aircraft, this sort of procedural discipline makes all the difference no matter what you fly.
If there are factors that need to be met it seems like a red indicator light should trigger a go around.
>A pilot called for flaps to be set to 20 degrees, and the other pilot cautioned they were too fast. The other pilot made additional comments regarding the aircraft’s excessive speed throughout the remainder of the recording. There was not a consistent verbal response to the comments about speed.
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.
> lack of adequate FAA mandated training around interpersonal dynamics
Generally, that's under the 'crew resource management' umbrella.
This interview aged well...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bIFdbd6dmKg&t=275s (4min 35sec)
Anyway, this is the opening scene of Season 2 and it feels eerily spot on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDu0b6nxMjY
It was an overrun accident of an Amazon cargo plane that killed 5 people: https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/06/us/boeing-miami-plane-overrun...
Pilot here but not ATP or Jet rated.
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).
Did fly jets, although not transport-class ones. Just to hammer home that everything here is correct, and the common thread through all aircraft types is disciplined execution.
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.
Do companies punish pilots for go arounds for costing them fuel and delays? If not outright punished, does it cost them in potential promotion/raises? Do they look into a go around enough to determine cause or are all go arounds assumed pilot error by the company?
No, a go around is not a pilot error and it's not punished.
It's almost the opposite. There is automatic monitoring for stable approach criteria (simplified: you must be at speed X with flaps selected etc by altitude Y). So this example would cause an automatic report from the aircraft to the airline, because they were too fast (not within stable approach criteria) and still continued the approach instead of going around.
However even in those cases it's not meant for punishment but for safety improvement. In most professional operations these reports are made anonymous, and only for example someone from a union committee gets to know who the crew were and could have a talk with them if necessary.
> No, a go around is not a pilot error and it's not punished.
But the cause of a need to go around can be pilot error. There could be non-pilot error needs for a go around like when there is a runway incursion so the pilot is waved off. If a pilot makes a bad approach, would that not be pilot error? Not being a pilot, I'm not sure of the procedure. I'm assuming a 767 uses autopilot for the majority of the flight. I just have no insight on whether the pilot or the autopilot is responsible for the approach.
AFAIK all Part 121 Passenger operations in the US (and most worldwide) have a no-fault go-around policy. Most have eliminated even the minimal requirement to denote a log entry as to the reason lest that make pilots reluctant to do the right thing. Some airlines even have monitoring programs and will penalize pilots for not going around when they should even if they save the landing. They don't want a bad habit to develop (normalization of deviance) because some day the holes in the swiss cheese will line up and the pilot won't be able to save the landing - and by then it will be too late.
Part 121 Cargo and Part 135 Charter are ... another story. Quality of training and procedures vary a lot. Some are run about as well as the Part 121 Passenger operations. At others a go-around is a career-limiting move.
I do not know how 21Air operated - leave that to the NTSB to discover - but it would not surprise me whatsoever if Amazon leans heavily on their contracted ACMIs and yanks contracts for delays. A go-around means an extra 15 minutes (give or take) and Amazon cuts their logistics schedules razor thin so they don't have to pay for extra labor. A 15-20 minute delay in unloading the airplane can mean the sorting center staff and delivery trucks sit idle (though it wouldn't surprise me if they just stiff the delivery contractors for the wasted time).
This isn't necessarily done with ill intent - the middle managers at Amazon are just chasing their numbers and an operator that prioritizes safety will inevitably have worse on-time performance. As is often the case these days outsourcing / contracting can end up being a race to the bottom even if no one intends it that way. FedEx Ground is all contractors who bid on routes. If you ever wonder why the driver throws your package or leaves it in your driveway: they had to be the lowest bidder to get the contract and that means X deliveries per hour or they lose money. It just so happens that with air cargo operations this kind of pressure can easily lead to an accident.
This should not be the case for any modern airline; too many accidents were caused by exactly this problem in the past.
However, I don't doubt shady operations might be doing this(more so if they aren't carrying passengers). They won't be around for long if they are caught doing this kind of nonsense and it causes an incident (or accident in this case).
Today there may be some rules (more than X go arounds because of weather, you have to divert, etc).
> I don't doubt shady operations
If there is a company willing to bend rules to increase profits, I'd bet it'd be Amazon's retail side. Not via explicit punishment, because that'd be too easy to catch, but bonuses for timely arrivals, fuel efficiency, and so on.
Provide evidence of any of this, or are you just spreading random fud because you don't like Amazon.
Claiming that this company is making Aviation unsafe is a serious accusation, that requires evidence.
Well they tend to optimize heavily by discouraging things like bathroom breaks, and I’ve seen evidence of this thinking in how they treat their drivers. I’m not sure why this would be extraordinary? On its face those incentives don’t sound bad except that they will incentivize unsafe behavior in edge cases like this.
Why do you think delivery driver stuff is any way comparable to aviation? Do you have evidence of pilots being forced to do unsafe things?
I think it matters a lot because Amazon doesn’t have their own airline. They contract out their aviation to multiple companies.
The incentive is to pick the lowest bid and that could be a company whose culture creates indirect pressure on pilots to be on time. All it takes is a dispatcher in a small company that is constantly irritated when things are late. Knowing that the other people are going to be angry with you for being late can make you hesitant to go around, causing exactly this type of accident.
Is this what happened? Probably not. Pilots get tunnel vision for any number of reasons.
I wonder if Amazon does.
Isn't there a call out usually where the plane says "minimums" and the pilot flying has to verbally confirm that they are committed? You'd think for this flight, that would have been the final time to realize they need to go around? Or is that strictly just a visibility call-out?
No you must pass the stabilized gate well before minimums; legal requirement is usually 1000ft above the airport for IMC (instrument conditions), 500ft for visual conditions. AFAIK airlines can set higher minimums and may set other configuration gates (eg 1500ft gear must be out, flaps in landing configuration).
To be stabilized you must be lined up laterally (eg localizer captured) and on glide slope (vertically aligned). Airspeed must be Vref +/-10, final landing configuration (flaps, gear, etc), sink rate correct (<1000fpm), power set (not idle), and all checklists complete.
Typically the pilot monitoring should make a callout for this (eg "Approach") and the pilot flying responds ("stabilized" or "unstable, going around").
The "minimums" callout is to verify that you can see the runway sufficiently to land. The exact requirements vary - a Category I ILS you can go down to 200ft without seeing the runway. A Category IIIb ILS is 50ft. Technically Category IIIc allows 0 so has no decision height and requires no "minimums" callout but I don't know of anyone crazy enough to allow this - you wouldn't be able to taxi off the runway with zero visibility.
The stabilized approach gate is a performance & configuration check. Is the aircraft configured for landing and on the correct performance profile with the expected automatic guidance?
Minimums callout (DA/MDA) is a visibility check. Can we see the runway to whatever degree our approach requires?
btw: If you are curious the various ILS categories impose performance and redundancy requirements on both aircraft and the airport ground equipment. Things like backup transmitters, self-monitoring to catch drift, battery backups, etc.
This has all the hallmarks of a "gethomeitis" disaster, where the urge to push on overrides better judgment about going around and doing things properly.
A bad driver never misses an exit.
> There was no indication in the recorded data that speed brakes or thrust reversers were deployed.
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.
The lack of contact of the left wheels on the ground, which the Weight of Wheel sensor deployment depends on, as in both wheels being grounded, which the auto-speed brakes/thrust reversers depend on, worsened the whole situation as the crew seems to be unaware why they weren't losing speed after they'd 'landed'.
Every single thing they could do wrong at, they did.
After applying the brakes for 8 seconds, they then went to full throttle to try get back in the air for four more seconds. That's bonkers.
> 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..
Take this with all the salt that random third-party guesses about a still-in-investigation event should be taken with -- think fully salt-cured ham -- but it looks like the landing was with a quartering tail wind, and the upwind (left) gear never really got weight on it; the wheel bogie needs to be straightened by weight against both the front and back wheels to register weight-on-wheel, and the auto-brake systems need positive weight-on-wheels from at least one redundant sensor on each of the three gear to engage. Came down hot, and basically skimmed with one wheel partially off the ground for some, most, or all of the way down the runway, preventing the braking systems from kicking in.
> think fully salt-cured ham
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
AIUI, they should never have gotten that far. They should have gone around at 1000 feet.
> They should have gone around at 1000 feet
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.
They were in a bad situation long before they touched the ground and should have gone around even earlier.
Totally agree. I'm pointing out that they had multiple moments after their mistakes to correct course, possibly down to the point when one of the pilots annunciates G-A (00:15, which is–agreed–late for that to come up for the first time).
Nothing prevented the pilots from applying speedbrakes. Nothing prevented the pilots from deploying spoilers. However the pilots were busy doing other things and, this is where your comment comes in, relied on automatic systems which require weight on the wheels
The problem occurred way behind that, when they refused to take a botched approach around. Everything else was just them doubling down on a bad decision over and over.
> Came down hot
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.
Someone who flew this exact airframe wrote that this plane "likes to float when empty, so if you’re not firm with putting it down, especially with those winds, it’ll just keep floating in ground effect."
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.
The prevailing opinion on PPRuNe is that the approach was totally botched from many miles out and the touchdown should never have been attempted (many participants there are professional pilots). There might have been a gust of wing as they were about to touch down, but they were also way too fast and lowered the flaps very late, literally as they crossed the runway threshold, causing extra float due to ground effect.
The pilot flying appears to have been dead set on landing on the first try no matter the cost and the first officer did not intervene as he should have.
They got incredibly lucky and both survived, however likely will never be behind the controls ever again.
> I don't know anything about flying. Is this normal?
Not deploying thrust reversers is normal, not all situations require them. But brakes are terrible when the wings are still flying, so spoilers (if armed as they should) automatically deploy when all wheel sensors report the aircraft is on the ground, so that there will be more weight on the wheels and the brakes can work properly.
Depending on the plane they need the wheels to have sufficient weight on them first. Also strangely the flaps 30 and flaps 40 call outs do not match.
The Boeing 767 does not have a Flaps 40 setting. The "Forty" callout was an automated annunciation of the radar-altimeter measured altitude above the runway.
Looking at it from the glass-half-full perspective, I'm impressed that pilots declare go-around as often as they do. As someone who sometimes can't decide whether I should declare a production incident (even if it's not my change), I wonder if it's possible to learn that decisiveness.
> I wonder if it's possible to learn that decisiveness.
If the culture allows for it, yes.
On final my instructor was talking about the next approach. I heard the words 'go around' and immediately executed one. He realized that (1) that conversation was unnecessary at that phase of the flight and (2) to not use those words unless he wants me to immediately go around :)
After soloing, I sometimes report that I had to go around because I didn't like how the approach or landing was looking like. I got praised for it every time.
So yes, it's all culture.
> can't decide whether I should declare a production incident
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
That's why there are standards that define when to go around. If you aren't stable, on glide slope, at proper airspeed, and the before-landing checklist complete at 1000 feet, a go-around is mandatory. There's no choice at that point (or should not be).
> That's why there are standards that define when to go around.
Greg Feith covered this well on one of the Mayday episodes, he put an American Airlines' manager on the stand during the NTSB investigation.
What were the company rules for pilots flying near thunderstorms?
When asked the question, he basically responded that he just didn't want his pilots flying into that type of weather. Our pilots are forbidden to enter or depart a terminal area blanketed by thunderstorms.
Well, that's a very subjective call for a pilot. Pilots need boundaries. You have to set limits.
If there's convective activity, that is thunderstorm activity, that's within five nautical miles of the airport, there's lightning, there's wind shear... don't go there.
Way better to abort and try again, than commit and run the risk of something going wrong. What harm is there in doing a go around if you can? They have plenty of fuel to try multiple times, and have clearance to do so if required.
So many mistakes. A notable part is this:
>> 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.
> unclear how speed didn't increase
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...
> How can you comment as if you are knowledgeable enough about aviation to speak on this with authority, but you aren't aware that ...
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.
This is par for the course for HN; smart people failing to interpret a comment in a charitable light, preferring instead to author a condescending reply in an apparent effort to score imaginary points at the expense of intellectually stimulating conversation.
Turbofans being slow to spool up is jets 101.
So presumably OP never took jets 101. Neither have I. So what? The condescension remains unjustified and contrary to fruitful interaction. (See also the "lucky 10000" xkcd.)
> OP never took jets 101. Neither have I. So what?
So you,me and OP will likely miss a lot of nuance when discussing jets - after all, reality has a lot of detail. Stating the existence of blindspots is not condescension, having blindspots does not make one inferior.
Does any combustion engine, like the one in your car, have instant throttle response? When you hit the kickdown switch in your car there is still a delay before you start really accelerating. Now imagine a much bigger engine - it's not very difficult to guess one of those would take even longer without being familiar with the inner workings of turbine engines.
This sounds about right to me, so I upvoted.
HN is particularly notorious for armchair aviation experts. I am an aerospace engineer having worked in airworthiness & certification as well as maintenance/repair/overhaul on multiple different aircraft types both fixed and rotary. I mention this only to establish my bona fides as someone who knows their shit:
The comments here during the 737 MAX MCAS thing were fucking wild. So many randoms spitting out confidently incorrect nonsense.
> The comments here during the 737 MAX MCAS thing were fucking wild. So many randoms spitting out confidently incorrect nonsense.
Maybe that helps explain some of the fraction of HN that loves LLMs: they found their soulmates.
The most ridiculous one was a poster who claimed that MCAS would run the trim at double the rate of the trim switches.
The trim motors only have 2 speeds - on and off.
That’s all forums in a nut shell. Any time you read about something you’re not personally familiar with it’s “look at all these people who know what they’re talking about… “, as soon as it’s something you are personally familiar with it’s “wtf are these people on about?!”
“Gell-Mann Amnesia“ - usually applied to media when experts scoff at stories they know to be sometimes woefully inaccurate but still accept all the other pages as gospel.
Coined by Michael Crichton (the famous author).
I've worked on several engine families engine certification, I can't read threads about aviation on HN because my brain hurts too much from people who know nothing posting like they are experts nonstop.
It actually causes me stress because a) I need to prevent myself from posting corrections and b) from knowing that these people are everywhere and are posting fud about trains or something
HN is notorious for armchair <insert-topic> experts for <insert-topic> you actually know, outside of software, computing/computing-adjacent electronic hardware and startups. “Fucking wild” “confidently incorrect nonsense” is likely the norm on most fringe topics, judging by the few I know about.
>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.
You get what you incentivize. The point of the number in the top right is to incentivize. This kind of contribution is what this place is built for.
Lots of armchair experts incorrecting each other
HN = A bunch of weirdly aggressive nerds who fail to explore nuance living in the same prison cell.
We're not jurors or NTSB investigators - this is just a public messageboard on a tech-focused platform. It's totally fine to speculate and wonder here ... and to be corrected respectfully.
Not having handles where they should be at 1000 callout should have been an instant toga party.
That they passed their minimums and still weren't set up correctly is shocking, yes. How can you commit to landing instead of going around when you're not configured for landing?
The more egregious thing to me though is ignoring the GPWS callouts on approach because they were chasing the glideslope. If you can't maintain a stable approach, you need to go around, it's the first thing you learn.
You expect this behaviour from a first-timer in the sim, not a commercial cargo pilot.
> You expect this behaviour from a first-timer in the sim, not a commercial cargo pilot.
I'm curious - are commercial pilots reprimanded for doing a go-round after messing up the approach?
No. They might have to say why they went around but they can't be punished for it (that's a great way to open yourself up to liability even stripping away all of the human elements). And I can't imagine any reason that an airline would truly care since they don't want their planes crashing so they don't want to discourage pilots from going around if they need to do so. The delay incurred is usually fairly small anyways, maybe 20-30 minutes.
However I will say that the majority of unstable approaches (97%!!) do continue to landing: https://flightsafety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Go-aroun...
...but I think that most of these unstable approaches are likely marginally unstable and only in one dimension. This landing was so far outside the realm of normal it's actually mind boggling that it actually happened. Pilots are trained to immediately go around without questioning it if many of the things that happened on this flight occur (such as not being in landing configuration well before touching down!)
No, they're reprimanded for continuing.
> 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.
I'm a pilot, and I don't fly turbofans/jets. Not claiming any "authority", but qualified to comment... It's not "something that basic" unless you fly in that category, there's a lot more to aviation experience than knowing a fact about an engine you don't use. (But hey, congrats to you that you know it!)
> I think a little more restraint is warranted in something like this..
More restraint than saying "unclear <i.e. to me> why ...", an exact statement about what I didn't know, which harms no one and led to several informative explanations by people who know (most of them in good spirit)?
This is what good conversation is about.
...
Anyway, the point I was making holds and is this:
Orthogonal to whether they could/should have gone around at that point, and given that they stayed on the ground after all, it may turn out that that 4 seconds of indecision (instead of pure deceleration) may have directly contributed to the fatalities at the end of the crash.
> 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)
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.
They didn't have much runway left at 00:15 and were far slower than 158 at that point. They came in far too fast, descending too rapidly; first touch was >50% down the runway, and they didn't get the left gear down, so the spoilers and brakes didn't apply until even later.
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.
Yea, they couldn’t get the left gear down because they they had enough airspeed to execute a go-around!
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...
Do we have a name for the judge?
> But they made the wrong choices at all of those points.
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).
Yeah, to some extent. But you see a lot more of this in GA (or Part 135) than in Part 121 airline operations. This was exceedingly bad judgement by real professional pilots in a 767.
> They didn't have much runway left at 00:15 and were far slower than 158 at that point
You're correct. When they first annunciate G-A, they've missed the chance. (They almost certainly had enough airspeed to G-A even after touching down, though.)
My question is whether throttling up for G-A at 00:15 is what caused the overshoot to extend out of the airport (versus if they'd committed to braking). This will come down to runway conditions, braking performance and the throttle responsse of their engines.
> This will come down to runway conditions, braking performance and the throttle responsse of their engines.
Well also, at what time point did all the tires finally make simultaneous firm contact with the ground? Ie were they going slow enough for braking performance to even matter?
Left main gear finally touched down at 00:19 and they slowed from 134 to 120 knots between 00:19 and 00:15.
> I think we'll find throttling to G-A and then aborting the G-A caused the crash.
Not even a chance.
> (unclear how speed didn't increase)
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.
The go-around decision was far too late. Remember the engines need significant time to spool up. The decision to cancel the go-around was correct (conditional on the preceding series of terrible decisions).
They were over takeoff velocity at that point and could have bounced up in the air and waited for the thrust to come. Would have been sketchy but better than what did happen.
They were not over takeoff velocity at that point. They were at 120 knots when they initiated GA and slowed to 117 knots before aborting (again, the engines take time to spool up despite full thrust configuration and no braking over those seconds). Takeoff is at least 130 knots, I don't know for their exact configuration. (At max takeoff weight it's something like 153 knots, but at the end of their flight they aren't carrying a full fuel load.)
mind you those numbers are seconds until the cvr stopped recording. they were a few hundred feet from the end of the runway when they initiated the go around and like the other poster said the turbines do take time to spool up from idle. they were so far out of normal spec for landing that it was absolutely pilot fault but not at the far end of the runway. they were not stabilized on approach way further back about 5 min or so. (if you're not stabilized on approach you are required to go around). they even called for flaps 30 halfway down the runway which is also not allowed for a stabilized approach.
Spool up time is 8-10s on high-bypass turbofan engines. They tried to go around maybe 1000ft from the end of the runway? It was far far too late to even try it at that point.
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.
Isn’t there a regulation for idle to full go-around thrust in a maximum of 8 seconds?
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.
> They commanded full power 15 seconds before the crash
Not 15 seconds before the crash, 15 seconds before the end of the recording. Then overran the runway 10 seconds before the end of the recording, then started crashing into objects 7 seconds before the end of the recording.
Thrust was reduced back to idle 11 seconds before the end of the recording, so just before departing the runway.
Ah, those timings make a lot more sense.
They aborted the go-around attempt because they were literally at the end of the runway; Probably because they thought it would be "safer" to run off the end without the engines rapidly reaching full thrust.
You’re imagining a last minute perfectly executed response after what appears to be a series of gross errors of judgement. Rarely works that way.
> Rarely works that way.
How sure are you? Could it actually happen that way 95% of the time, which means they don’t crash and we never hear about it? Likely a pilot gets disciplined for the other errors and nobody else cares? This exact thing could happen 20 times with everything turning up relatively ok and we only heard about it because they didn’t make that final call correctly either.
To be clear I’m not an aviator, just an armchair statistician with an interest in aviation
> This exact thing could happen 20 times with everything turning up relatively ok and we only heard about it because they didn’t make that final call correctly either
This concept is called normalization of deviance and is the cause of a lot of accidents in aviation and other fields.
This was a discussion in the aviation subreddit too. I am also not an aviator, but just someone with an interest.
What the outcome of the discussion was that it depends on the culture and training of the organisation. It could be possible that it does happen like this 95% of the time with no crash in that specific organisation.
The fact they were even in that situation is only worth philosophizing about to a point. Because they were only in that situation due to what appears to be a series of totally unacceptable decisions that got them there. Based on everything that's come out, I'm comfortable saying as a former military aviator that in my opinion, this crash happened due to a complete failure of airmanship on the part of both crew members.
- 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.
Advice I've seen many experienced captains give when you're FO and captain is fixated on landing: declare going around to tower. It avoids a fight over controls or the captain trying to override you; in that moment they're unlikely to jump on the radio and say "no we aren't".
YMMV though, I'm not an ATP.
At 100,000ft the pilot is just another Amazon delivery driver.
And the other pilot is another Amazon driver riding shotgun as required by law.
“As required by law” is a synonym for “as bad as is still legal.”
> no excuses
Airplanes don't pay any attention to excuses. The only way to fly is do it perfectly, every time.
Nathan fielder explored the relationship between pilots in season 2 of `The Rehearsal` , as much as it was comedy this is another example where his findings might have helped
Captain Steeeve’s latest video on this tragedy is shocking, complete disregard for the aviation rules. I think he cited 11 separate instances of __mandatory__ go around, the first of which was before they were anywhere near the runway at 1000ft elevation.
He may or may not be right here, but captain steeeve has a bad track record of baseless claims and/or bad speculation and is not a good reference due to his past failings.
I would not be referencing him as a good source.
I don't know the specific items that were called out here but I can tell you, as a flight instructor, that the failure to capture the glideslope was already enough to require a go-around. The late flap settings were too. So was the high airspeed. At no point did they have a stabilized approach. There were multiple unequivocal mandatory go-around conditions before they got to the runway.
It was not clear from watching how he got to 11 but the number is not particularly relevant - once you have one of them you induce many.
So sad. Multiple humans may make more serious mistakes as a group than individually could. FAR/AIM is written with blood. There could be an automated safeguard to block such landing attempts - with the capability of explicit emergency override - based on the profile of the approach or even just based on the intercom.
Two people in the cockpit is pointless if the junior one won't speak up. CRM only works when rank stays out of the decision loop.
Waiting for the Mentour Pilot episode on this.
I said basically the same thing at [0], but my comments from the past couple of days all got dead fast.
Anyway, Mentour Pilot has a 2.5 minute short coverage, and the long form one is indeed something to look forward to.
tldw, per Blancolirio: unstable approach, crew should have done a go around at 1000 agl but did not attempt one until it was too late, then aborted the go around.
I think the real question is why didn't the pilots do a go around. I bet there are underlying pressures from the airlines and/or amazon to not do a go around to avoid schedule delays or fuel costs.
I've never heard of anything even close to this.
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.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/miami-plane-crash-21-air-safety...
> 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."
Notably, none of those allegations from the fired former chief(!) pilot actively suing the company while appealing his rejected OSHA case touch on in-flight procedures.
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.
> ...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?
Even if the pilots were getting their legally mandated rest, passenger pilots are held to a higher crew rest requirements because the lessons learned from Colgan Air only apply to passenger airlines. Even if that were enough rest the flight departed at what was likely their circadian low.
Ahh, so the Amazon delivery contractor squeeze but the air cargo version, with the air cargo corporate entity shielding Amazon from liability.
We'll see if the NTSB mentions piss bottles in the cabin.
I don't really see how it's possible since the plane probably has a lavatory for the pilots.
Maybe those were taken out so that the plane was capable of carrying more packages.
It costs money to have a contractor service the lavatory waste tank after every flight.
Since the lavatory is not on the Minimum Equipment List, it would cost 30 minutes of paperwork to update the maintenance log and declare it inoperative.
Depends on how much of a psychopath the person doing the cost-benefit analysis is I suppose.
Cargo airplanes typically don't.
Get-there-itis is absolutely a thing. No big airline would be dumb enough to say it that stuff explicitly but the pressures still exist.
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.
Get-there-itis is - quite famously - a pilot's internal desire (note: written before your ninja edit).
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.
The worst aviation accident ever had this as a major contributing factor, the KLM plane at Tenerife was almost near their maximum crew time so if they didn't take off soon they'd have to stay overnight.
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)
Yep, that 49 year old disaster led to major changes, which is why I’m dubious that corporate pressure was involved here.
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.
There have already been crashes where one contributing factor was pressure to land and avoid any kind of delay - even if risky. Remember that pressure doesn’t need to be explicit. It can be the result of all kinds of factors - including physical. Maybe they were already late and pilots with fewer “on time” arrivals are lower in line for promotions. We already have stories from Amazon delivery drivers and it’s not insane to think some of that culture has leaked through to other aspects.
Is there any evidence of your theory?
Has timeliness based performance reviews ever been reported at any US carrier in the past half century?
And high levels of stress can lead people to break rules. People lose the cognitive faculties needed for compliance. Even things that person personally believes and agrees with.
We are talking about the same company that forces its employees to piss in bottles while driving to save time.
I'm no Amazon fan, but that was routine in trucking before Bezos was even born.
Similar to farmers working in the fields - they didn't walk all the way back to the farmhouse if they had to pee.
It's not their choice though, they have to. I wouldn't care much if they chose to.
Go arounds are not even very common (like 0.3% of landings).
Southwest airlines had a culture of turning around fast at the gate. So maybe no explicit policy but culture can drive unintended consequences and decisions.
Fast gate turnarounds have nothing to do with what happens in the cockpit. That affects the cleaning crews.
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.
1 passenger fatality. They also have at least one ground fatality. (Still very impressive!)
Turnaround at a gate and a life-or-death go-around judgement are two entirely different operations governed by entirely different sections of the FAA.
Also this was Amazon, not Southwest.
Southwest's had a few dramatic overruns by pilots overeager to get on the ground, notably at Burbank (no fatalities) and Midway (one death).
I think the point being made is that time-pressure can come from a company's culture, not just its (unspoken) policies.
>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,
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.
The only thing silly is comparing the construction industry to the airline industry. Construction is pretty notorious for openly encouraging unsafe work environments, airlines are not.
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.
Pilot gets more veto power than the crane guy who gets more veto power than the residential concrete crew but they all still get talked to if they can't get their jobs done.
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.
Fair enough.
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?
Specifically avoid a go around? IDK.
Commit to an action that ultimately caused a crash because they wanted to achieve ancillary goals (e.g. not be late)? Tons.
They call this "get-there-itis" (makes me feel so dirty trotting out buzzwords like that).
I mean... The problem is common enough that there are industry specific terms to describe it. Go search that database for "commercial pressure" and I'm certain you'll find what your sealioning self is demanding from everyone else.
0 results for the search term “commercial pressure” within full narratives or synopsis on Ntsb.gov. https://www.ntsb.gov/Pages/ResultsV2.aspx?queryId=dc2a25cf-b...
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.
There is one thing an airline never wants to have happen and it is a fatal accident. Everything else is secondary. Having one caused by corporate policy would lead to mass exodus of passengers.
21Air isn't a passenger airline though, it's cargo. It's conceivable that they have lower standards, hire less experienced pilots, and just don't emphasize safety culture in the same way that passenger airlines do.
> It's conceivable that they have lower standards, hire less experienced pilots, and just don't emphasize safety culture in the same way that passenger airlines do.
In German railways there is a saying "Fracht motzt nicht, Fracht kotzt nicht" - freight neither complains nor vomits.
I would not be surprised at all to find this kind of attitude in air freight transportation too.
The same FAA that lets Boeing certify its own planes?
This is based on my understanding from several pilots who have weighted in.
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.
> Neither of them will ever fly again
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.
In one of the videos you can see dark clouds behind the plane. I suspect the pilots knew they'd have to divert to a different airport if they couldn't land and put pressure on themselves to not have to do that.
You can go around and try again at the same airport long before you have to divert.
Normalization of deviance. While there may have been some pressure from corporate or whatever, my guess is that the pilot flying was the one who only got his type rating a few months ago and that he'd done this at least a few times before in another type and gotten away with it. Now in a bigger, less nimble craft, he didn't.
I suspect the pilots knew it wasn't a great approach but it just didn't click how bad it was. They just felt committed to the approach and thought they could 'fix it' without realizing how bad things really were. Having good enough situational awareness that you wave off when you are supposed to generally means that you also aren't wildly off speed/other parameters. They clearly had lost situational awareness.
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?!
How did they ignore the descent rate and speed? They were absolutely diving at the ground. It's just such an elementary mistake.
Bingo.
Could a company that won't let delivery drivers stop to pee possibly be pushing their pilots that hard? Yes. Yes, they could.
Pilot B kept warning pilot A(who was at the controls) that the airspeed was too high and no adjustments were made https://www.npr.org/2026/09/10/g-s1-142664/cargo-plane-miami...
Yeah, but it's also Pilot B's job to take over if Pilot A isn't flying safely. He didn't.
The "hazardous attitudes" study in this report will be gold.
"Capitalism caused this crash"
Ah, yes, the Soviets never took risks. It couldn't be that humans are fallible.
If there was pressure to arrive quickly (hence the high airspeed) or not do a go-around for whatever profit-related reasons, then I would say need to profit was involved in the decision making process that led to this.
When you take resource consumption out of the equation, you are more free to make lower-risk decisions.
telling yourselves that it was "communism" that did this as opposed to the stark raving lunancy of the current American regime is hilarious misunderstanding of political ideals.
No buddy. I'm just saying it wasn't "capitalism," which was your claim. I don't think you can pin this on Trump or his admin, either.
Obligatory Blancolirio link: https://youtu.be/dcf7n0T3D9c
Yep, its also the most intuitive way to reason about it when you look at the data. Unfortunately, a bad call. I'm sure many of us would have made the same mistake.
> I'm sure many of us would have made the same mistake.
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.
Private pilot here. No, I'm quite sure very few of you here would have made the same mistake as evidenced by the fact that literally hundreds of thousands of aircraft land successfully every day, many of them under much more adverse conditions. This is not a oh-it-could-have-happened-to-anyone kind of screwup, this is a did-this-guy-really-go-through-basic-pilot-training kind of screwup.
I’m not a manned pilot, but have my part 107 and have spent a few thousand hours flying combat flight sims - ~150kts in a cargo aircraft, four seconds from departing the runway, seems like the worst possible time to abort a touch-and-go. Then consider the numerous automated audio warnings and the copilot suggesting a go-around, and it seems pretty ridiculous to me.
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.
They could have “aborted” at almost any time prior to when they did. And even that may have been fine if they had stuck with it.
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.
I have a strong hunch there a deeper more human/emotional component involved. Like Pilot A was not in the right mental headspace. A bad breakup? Some other kind of personal loss? Or an urgency of a personal kind?
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?
Not enough info yet. Clearly they landed too fast, but why? Was there some problem on approach which caused a fast landing? NTSB hasn't gotten to that part yet.
From the timeline, one pilot knew they were too fast 90 seconds before touchdown.
From the videos there was some serious weather in the area. Also the aircraft was very light.
Serious weather? Ehhh...
> [01:42] A pilot called for flaps to be set to 20 degrees, and the other pilot cautioned they were too fast. The other pilot made additional comments regarding the aircraft’s excessive speed throughout the remainder of the recording. There was not a consistent verbal response to the comments about speed
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...
Related:
Prime Air crash: 10+ mandatory go-around triggers were ignored [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650689 - September 2026
apparently they weren't even properly configured until almost touching down.
So, is 21 Air finally going to be facing issues for fudging safety?
Not their first fuck up rodeo.
I know that it's not a luxury that all metro areas can implement, but if you look at airports like Denver or Kansas City, there is a very, very good reason that those airports are out in the middle of nowhere. Lots of accidents happen close to the runway, either on takeoff or landing. It's better that it be in a field than a road or building filled with people.
Isn't this usually because people don't like big jets flying over their houses.
The way this was dealt with historically, for better or for worse, was to put the cheap housing under the flight path. The proles were left to deal with the noise. The Harlem neighborhood of Kansas City North is a good example of this. It sits next to MKC and has a flophouse motel, a car repair shop, and little else.
When aircraft got significantly faster, heavier, and larger with the advent of jet airliners, it became less of a noise issue and more of a safety issue. You can tell people to put up with noise, you can't tell them to put up with a huge airplane falling out of the sky onto their homes.
They made a whole song about this
Prediction: this incident will eventually lead to the mandating of AI pilot assistance on large aircraft. AI doesn't defer to old guys.
I've been watching the Flying for Money videos on this. He has interesting insight. It's a bit disappointing he just threw the data into an LLM for processing since it doesn't seem that hard to process, but otherwise he's been pretty good at bringing up likely possibilities based on Occam's razor. Mostly around negligence and most recently about junior vs senior pilot shyness vs ego.
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.
The NTSB confirmed that while the pilot applied the physical wheel brakes, the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) showed zero evidence that the speed brakes/spoilers ever extended. They also overshot the runway; I think those were the key mistakes that caused the accident.
https://www.wisn.com/article/amazon-cargo-plane-black-box-mi...
No, the left main was not on the ground after touchdown for some time. The aircraft will not auto-deploy the spoilers nor autobrake until it senses weight on weels. It also locks out the thrust reversers. All for obvious reasons.
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.
> The aircraft will not auto-deploy the spoilers nor autobrake until it senses weight on weels. It also locks out the thrust reversers. All for obvious reasons.
While I agree the obvious course of action would be a go-around, a manual override for when you know doing the stupid thing is the least unsafe thing to do would be handy.
I disagree, the situations where you are not fully on the ground but still want those things are minimal, thats a go around need at that point. I bet it would be set off way more accidently then it ever would be on purpose. The systems are also highly redundant so its extremely unlikely they would fail and there would be a valid reason to override the computer.
Plus even in this case it wouldn't have saved them, it was too fast too far, plus Im sure there would be some unpleasantness if both engines went full reverse while one landing gear was still not on the ground, thats gonna be some yaw right there :p . Its kinda like saying what if I need to override ABS?
Seeing a 767 wheelbarrow down a runway is so surreal. Brings back fond memories of scaring CFIs in a 172.
Watched the video and one of the main set of wheels was off the ground a good amount time. Applying brakes then would have gone bad, they would have skidded sideways. They also landed almost flat, front wheel touched the ground almost the same time as one of the back set of wheels, that just looked ... bad.
The key mistakes were that they had 11 mandatory go-around situations between 1000ft before touchdown and overshooting the runway and they didn't go around.
Does the 767 have automated voice callouts for those?
Several of them involve mandatory responses to certain voice callouts from the aircraft:
No, this stuff is all downstream of their terrible earlier decisions.