>> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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..
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."
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
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?!
The branding on the plane is Prime Air, but it's not actually Amazon owned and run. Instead it's a cargo airline (21 Air) that they contract with to operate cargo flights with Prime Air livery on the planes.
It'll be interesting to see the outcome of the NTSB investigation, they're usually quite thorough.
CH Robinson, though, just lost a lawsuit at the Supreme Court with similar premises. They are a freight forwarder and third-party logistics outfit that contracts large amounts of capacity with subcontractors (airlines, trucking companies, shipping lines, etc.) and sells a complete package to their clients.
One of CHR's service providers was conducting hiring shenanigans and not fully, legally screening their drivers. One of the service provider's drivers hit another vehicle and crippled that vehicle's driver, who sued. CHR argued all liability should fall on the trucking company who hired the driver. The Supreme Court said no, CHR could be held liable for negligence in vetting their service provider as well, because it was ultimately CHR's load being carried.
I'm not a lawyer, but under that legal precedent, it seems Amazon might not be off the hook for damages in this case, given it was their subcontractor who was carrying Amazon cargo in a jet with "Prime Air" on the side.
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 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?
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 made a series of at least ten (and that's kind of charitable) this-must-never-happen mistakes that likely rise to the level of extraordinary criminal negligence, including ignoring checklists, alarms, configuring the plane for landing in general, and basically everything related to safety.
You don't have to extend sympathy, just as you don't have to extend sympathy to drunk drivers who kill people.
I am not a pilot and I don't know anything about flying. I can go along with the idea that the pilot / crew made mistakes. So the next obvious question is how do we make sure this does not happen again?
I am not a pilot nor do I know aviation but I sincerely doubt the air traffic controller on duty has the mental capacity to babysit each and every plane that is departing and arriving second guessing each and every decision they make. I don't know if they even have access to all the data the pilots have and even if they did I don't know if they can make decisions on time. I mean the way I see it the ATC will coordinate with grounds crew to make sure a plane can land/crash land as safely as possible even if it has no engines, wheels, or even flaps. I don't know how but I know they will try their best to coordinate everyone the best they can.
I mean, complete ethical nihilism is one way to try to avoid losing this particular argument, but I don't think you'll get many people to agree with you on it.
You're being downvoted because actual qualified aviators are telling you how egregious of a mistake this looks to be, and you're quibbling with them without any professional credibility on the subject.
In any aviation incident, it’s generally a good idea to wait for the full NTSB report before drawing any firm conclusions.
That said, it is exceedingly difficult to find any explanation for what happened in this case that doesn’t boil down to incompetence or gross negligence.
There were so many opportunities to avoid this accident. The crew seemingly more or less single-handedly punched a hole straight through the entire Swiss cheese model. It’s so bad it’s hard to imagine they weren’t drunk at the controls.
> [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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
https://www.wisn.com/article/amazon-cargo-plane-black-box-mi...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
Also this was Amazon, not Southwest.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?!
If people die in the process, that's regrettable but its a sacrifice he is willing to make.
It'll be interesting to see the outcome of the NTSB investigation, they're usually quite thorough.
One of CHR's service providers was conducting hiring shenanigans and not fully, legally screening their drivers. One of the service provider's drivers hit another vehicle and crippled that vehicle's driver, who sued. CHR argued all liability should fall on the trucking company who hired the driver. The Supreme Court said no, CHR could be held liable for negligence in vetting their service provider as well, because it was ultimately CHR's load being carried.
I'm not a lawyer, but under that legal precedent, it seems Amazon might not be off the hook for damages in this case, given it was their subcontractor who was carrying Amazon cargo in a jet with "Prime Air" on the side.
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.
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?
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.
You don't have to extend sympathy, just as you don't have to extend sympathy to drunk drivers who kill people.
Is there anything that can be done at all here?
They have a well deserved reputation for the quality and accuracy of their incident reports, and they don't pull their punches.
I don't have sympathy. I also do know of drunk drivers that have been arrested, who are, good people. Shit happens. I'm not going to judge.
Sincerely, A former military aviator
That said, it is exceedingly difficult to find any explanation for what happened in this case that doesn’t boil down to incompetence or gross negligence.
There were so many opportunities to avoid this accident. The crew seemingly more or less single-handedly punched a hole straight through the entire Swiss cheese model. It’s so bad it’s hard to imagine they weren’t drunk at the controls.
Prime Air crash: 10+ mandatory go-around triggers were ignored [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650689 - September 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm6G7EOP5Qc
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...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccq30minme8
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.