Despite regulations requiring it, an air traffic controller failed to tell the pilots of an Amazon-branded cargo plane about the potential for strong tail winds as they landed in Miami, where the plane careened off the runway and killed five people last month, according to a preliminary report Thursday from the National Transportation Safety Board.
Just four minutes before clearing the plane for landing, an air traffic controller had provided a wind advisory to a different flight, noting gusts of up to 25 mph from the south. But the controller “did not issue information about the wind” to the pilots of the cargo plane, the report said.
According to federal regulations, “both wind direction and velocity were required to be stated when authorizing use of a runway when a tail wind component exists,” the NTSB report said.
The preliminary report did not list a cause of the crash. The ongoing investigation could take more than a year to complete.
The airplane, carrying packages of contact lenses for Amazon, came in fast after a flight from Puerto Rico and barreled roughly 1,200 feet past the end of the runway at Miami International Airport on Sept. 6. It smashed into a van carrying workers for a company that cleans airplanes. Five people who were in the van died. Two others in the van sustained serious injuries, as did the driver of a car that was hit by the plane. The two pilots had minor injuries.
Tail winds can make landing a plane harder
Experts said it appears the weather played at least some role in the accident. Tail winds can make it harder to slow a plane and push it past an ideal landing spot on a runway.
“When you’ve got winds like that, it is your responsibility as a controller to issue that to a pilot, especially on landing and especially when you have gusts,” said Tony Mello, a former Federal Aviation Administration official who oversaw air traffic control services in the central U.S.
Landing with a gusting tail wind “requires more concentration on the part of the pilot” but is not impossible, said former NTSB member John Goglia.
Failing to share the wind conditions “was a significant omission but, in and of itself, would not have caused a crash,” Goglia said. “Every crash is a chain of events. That’s just one event.”
The plane had little runway left when it touched down
A summary of cockpit voice recordings previously released by the NTSB said one of the pilots repeatedly warned his counterpart that they were going too fast as they approached for landing and after touchdown. But the fellow pilot never gave “a consistent verbal response” to the warnings, the NTSB said. The two pilots had flown together for the first time just earlier that day, according to the preliminary NTSB report.
The cockpit audio recordings also captured a series of automated warnings from the plane about the speed of descent and the approaching terrain.
When it touched down, the plane was traveling at 184 mph and was already about three-quarters of a mile past the start of the runway, the NTSB report said.
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The pilots may have tried too late to abort the landing. Data from the plane show its wheel brakes were applied, then released as the engines throttled to “go-around” thrust values before the brakes again were applied with about 415 feet of runway remaining.
The plane ran off the pavement while still traveling at 130 mph, then struck some airport equipment and the cleaning crew’s van before crashing through a perimeter fence, hitting a car on a public road and coming to rest with its nose in a parking lot fence, the preliminary report said.
Plane’s operator says it’s focused on safety
After the crash, Amazon suspended its partnership with 21 Air, which operated the plane. The North Carolina carrier had flown packages for Amazon since 2024. The Boeing 767 that crashed was 32 years old and originally built to carry passengers. It was converted to a cargo plane in June 2016, the preliminary NTSB report said.
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The plane’s operator, 21 Air, said in a written statement Thursday that safety is “a core focus” of its organization.
“We are reviewing the information in the NTSB preliminary report closely, alongside our own internal safety and operational protocols, and we will take all appropriate action to improve our safety based on the facts as they are established,” the company said.
The Miami crash came less than a year after a UPS cargo plane crashed at Louisville’s Muhammad Ali International Airport after losing its engine while accelerating down the runway. That crash killed all three pilots and 12 people on the ground. Twenty-three more were injured.
