Amazon Freighter Runway Overrun, Fire, MIA, 9/6

midwestpa24 said:
Also keep in mind METAR winds are largely an average not a minute-to-minute weather reading, and don't do real well keeping up with rapidly changing conditions. It is entirely possible a gust front was crossing the airport as the aircraft was attempting to land, that the METAR didn't report.

Not that it is any excuse to continue an unstable approach, botched landing, attempted go around, etc.
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Reminds me of the Glider Accident in Rifle Colorado a few years ago. A friend of mine was flying about 15 minutes behind the accident glider.
I am pretty sure the recorded/logged information is only snapshots of what is actually being said on the radio. My friend indicated they had listened to the AWOS and it was about 290° at 5 kts, gusting to 16, The Glider Spun in on final to Runway 26 at 1737. The AWOS then at 1753 recorded wind from 290° at 5 kts, gusting to 16
The remarks section of the observation noted a peak wind from 190° at 43 kts, which occurred at 1739.

So essentially it seems the Awos reported the wind shift and gust occurring 2 minutes after the accident, and didn't even record it until 6 minutes after the accident.

no way of knowing with the info we have seen if this was a factor in the overun accident.
 
I don't know where these pilots picked up the airplane, but if it was CVG they may have exceeded their duty limits.
 
flyingron said:
Typical shotgun pleading which is entirely frowned upon by the court. You can expect motions from all the spurious parties early on to be excluded.

So we have:
Amazon.com - parent company
Amazon.com Services (d/b/a Amazon Air Cargo)
21 Air
Avia Acquisition - They own 21 Air.
Avia Investments - They own Avia Acquisition
Andromeda Leasing II - They appear to actually own the aircraft
Titan Air - Owns Andromeda
Atlas Air - Owns Titan
[REDACTED] - The pilots.
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midwestpa24 said:
I'm actually surprised they skipped Boeing, GE, Goodyear, Rockwell Collins, etc.
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What kind of van?
 
I actually knew the Captain from his time in the Army. Same battalion in Germany in 1ID. Never flew with him though.
 
During recurrent I’m sure they see it routinely… but it’s train to proficiency.

Unless it’s not, and then it’s just “let’s do that again”.

I’ve seen about 3 washouts in 20 years…. Shoulda been quite a few more.
 
Kenny Taylor said:
I was wondering the same thing.. How normalized does this become before an accident occurs?
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According to an NTSB member at the Bombardier Safety Standdown about 10 years ago, about 3% of airliner landings are from unstable approaches.

Small percentage, but the real number per day (which I can’t remember) kind of shocked me.
 
Let's revisit the Delta 4819 crash in Toronto where the inexperienced low-time FO at the controls decided to try an F18 landing instead of a go-around on an obvious unstable approach in windy conditions.
 
FlightmechH3 said:
Let's revisit the Delta 4819 crash in Toronto where the inexperienced low-time FO at the controls decided to try an F18 landing instead of a go-around on an obvious unstable approach in windy conditions.
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And the instructor in the left seat watched it happen like it was an episode of Air Disasters
 
There's a crash down in the USVI in the 70s the comes to mind. The flight engineer coincidentally was the person who gave me my first ride in a small airplane.
There was a disagreement between the relatively low time-in-type pilot and the much higher time flight engineer (due to being bumped down to the 727 from the DC-8 due to airline furloughs) as to whether to go around or not.

 
GLMS_NC said:
I'm sure the contract between 21Air and Amazon is tight and Amazon has zero responsibility. Much like regionals have with the big carriers. Mary Schiavo has covered this topic thoroughly. Her example was the Colgan Air accident where Colgan got pinned for everything.
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I heard a legal commentator today saying Amazon may not be off the hook, that needs to be determined. The issue apparently is if this kind of procedures is not a one-off and if Amazon was aware of the flying practices of the 21Air crews.

A lot of the discussion was on assigning responsibility and that there may be some that Amazon bears. They said it may be tough to prove, but then went on to list some other cases (non aviation) where the Amazon type company was proven to be partially responsible for continuing to work with a company they knew had issues.
 
FlightmechH3 said:
Let's revisit the Delta 4819 crash in Toronto where the inexperienced low-time FO at the controls decided to try an F18 landing instead of a go-around on an obvious unstable approach in windy conditions.
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Here ya go. Not sure what you hope to accomplish with it at this point.

skyking3286

Thread 'Toronto - Delta Airlines CRJ-900 upside down, Flight 4819 from Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport (MSP) to Toronto'

channel2now.com

Plane crash reported at Toronto Pearson Airport

Authorities are responding to a reported plane crash at Toronto Pearson International Airport, according to Peel Regional Police. Initial reports indicate that a Delta Airlines CRJ-900, operating as Delta Flight 4819 from Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport (MSP) to Toronto (YYZ), was...
channel2now.com channel2now.com
  • Wow
 
M20K said:
I heard a legal commentator today saying Amazon may not be off the hook, that needs to be determined. The issue apparently is if this kind of procedures is not a one-off and if Amazon was aware of the flying practices of the 21Air crews.

A lot of the discussion was on assigning responsibility and that there may be some that Amazon bears. They said it may be tough to prove, but then went on to list some other cases (non aviation) where the Amazon type company was proven to be partially responsible for continuing to work with a company they knew had issues.
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Ya know, at this point we don't even know what entity is contracted with who. As was posted earlier there is quite a hierarchy of companies involved. Amazon may be contracted with another of the entities other than 21Air that subs work to someone and then 21Air. Who knows.

We can speculate all day long on this (as the legal commenter referenced in your post said) but one thing we can all agree on is this - its going to be a complex legal and insurance company headache for years. Not months but years.
 
Doc Holliday said:
OK, so tell us the point you are trying to make.
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Under qualified and incompetent pilots making bad decisions. It seems like there is borderline arrogance of some people that think they can do no wrong and make the same mistakes as others where deaths have occurred. We don't need to wait for another year to get the official report. In that time hundreds of pilots are going to do stupid stuff like this crash and the 21Air in Miami.
 
FlightmechH3 said:
Under qualified and incompetent pilots making bad decisions. It seems like there is borderline arrogance of some people that think they can do no wrong and make the same mistakes as others where deaths have occurred. We don't need to wait for another year to get the official report. In that time hundreds of pilots are going to do stupid stuff like this crash and the 21Air in Miami.
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"Hundreds of pilots are going to do stupid stuff like this crash"?

Hundreds? Seriously?
 
M20K said:
I heard a legal commentator today saying Amazon may not be off the hook, that needs to be determined. The issue apparently is if this kind of procedures is not a one-off and if Amazon was aware of the flying practices of the 21Air crews.

A lot of the discussion was on assigning responsibility and that there may be some that Amazon bears. They said it may be tough to prove, but then went on to list some other cases (non aviation) where the Amazon type company was proven to be partially responsible for continuing to work with a company they knew had issues.
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Like a prior comment mentioned, they'll dig up every e-mail that even remotely mentioned issues with 21 Air. I've worked several e-discovery efforts from the tech/security side. They'll find text messages and Teams chats histories where staff discuss or even joke about the 21 Air issues. Management will be on some of those threads, and it starts to look like willful ignorance. Not sure how much of that sticks on the legal side, but it can't look good in front of a jury.
 
M20K said:
I heard a legal commentator today saying Amazon may not be off the hook, that needs to be determined.
Click to expand...
This is about as surprising as saying the sun will come up tomorrow. Whatever would we do without expert opinion given in front of microphones?
 
FlightmechH3 said:
Let's revisit the Delta 4819 crash in Toronto where the inexperienced low-time FO at the controls decided to try an F18 landing instead of a go-around on an obvious unstable approach in windy conditions.
Click to expand...

Whoa......all my F/A-18 landings remained right-side-up thank you :)
 
You can divide the defendents in to four groups:

Amazon (the overall company plus the subsidiary that does the transportation).
21 Air (the operator, and their investor/owners, which doesn't appear to include Amazon at this point, but that may change)
Atlas (the owner of the plane, who lease it to 21 Air).
The Pilots.

Now the pilots are probably responsible, but legally, it's the operator who is supposed to be making sure it doesn't happen.
Atlas would appear to have liability if there were something wrong with the plane beyond maintenance (which is likely still 21 Air's responsibility).
Amazon would need to have been shown to exert some control (economic or otherwise) over 21 Air to be liable. Just because they say "Paint our name on your plane and fly our boxes" doesn't in itself incur liability.

Of course, 21 Air and the Pilots likey have little to go after. Amazon and Atlas are the juicy targets.
 
FlightmechH3 said:
Under qualified and incompetent pilots making bad decisions. It seems like there is borderline arrogance of some people that think they can do no wrong and make the same mistakes as others where deaths have occurred. We don't need to wait for another year to get the official report. In that time hundreds of pilots are going to do stupid stuff like this crash and the 21Air in Miami.
Click to expand...

Let's look at this closer. I take it you've never been associated with the airline industry and have little to zero knowledge of the inner workings. Not a problem.

When an accident happens in the industry other carriers take note, as do the pilots. No one wants to end up in the situation the accident pilots ended up in. Right now everyone is thinking stabilized approach and go around awareness. Initial and recurrent classes are talking about it and during sim training a bit of emphasis is being placed on it.

Once the investigation is over there will be recommendations and it will make it's way into all carriers. Most carriers will be proactive and not wait for the final report and go ahead making changes to training.

The Toronto crash is not really the same as what happened in Miami. Very different dynamics in play here and each accident will change how the industry trains and operates.

The US has had an unprecedented safety record in air carrier aviation When given the shear numbers of operations versus accidents, the percentage is extremely low. This is why your "hundreds of pilots doing stupid stuff" just doesn't make the cut. In airline cockpits the standardization is very high and if someone doesn't follow through, they stick out like a sore thumb. Yes, on occasion someone falls through the cracks and most times they are caught by other crew members, Line Check Airman or training. The Miami accident will focus on how this progressed to a point where several gates failed to catch this problem and the entire industry will learn and adapt from it.

During my career we learned from several accidents, changed our way we trained and operated to achieve the safest airline system in the world. Nothing is perfect but we can strive for perfection.
 
Stabilized approach criteria procedures have evolved significantly over the past decades but there are still differences in the implementation and philosophy from airline to airline.

At my previous airlines, the reject gate was at 1,000' AFL. If you did not meet stabilized approach criteria at, or after, 1,000' AFL a go-around was mandatory and it was the pilot-monitoring's job to call for one if the pilot-flying did not do it on his own. This is also when the "Stable" call would be made verifying that the criteria was met.

At my current airline, there are three gates. Plan, Report, and Reject at 1,500', 1,000', and 500'.

At first, the lower reject seemed odd, but there's a good reason for it. The threat of non-compliance (not going around) when unstabil at the reject gate is what is being addressed. At 1,000', there is still plenty of time to fix small exceedances. Pilots develop a habit of intentional non-compliance at the 1,000' gate and that leads to there not really being a hard reject gate in practice.

My current company's system is to plan to be gear-down, speed 180kts, or less, by the plan gate. Fully configured, airspeed +15/-5 Vtgt, and on vertical and lateral profile with sustained vertical speed <= 1,200 fpm at the Report gate. If any parameter is not met, the PM calls out the deviation but the approach can continue. At the Reject gate, the PF calls out "Stable" or "Unstable, going around". If he does not, the PM calls, "Go-around, [reason]" i.e "Go-around, airspeed".

In my now over 11 years of using this system, I like it a lot better. It removes most of the intentional non-compliance on approaches that are still safe while emphasising the hard reject gate at a point when you really do need to go-around if unstable.
 
It's interesting that the Navy P8 overrun in Hawaii in 2023 has been buried. Zero report and the aircraft was scrapped.

Also the Toronto crash. 20 months later and no findings. Outright refusal of Canada and Delta to release anything.

Why the coverups?
 
FlightmechH3 said:
It's interesting that the Navy P8 overrun in Hawaii in 2023 has been buried. Zero report and the aircraft was scrapped.

Also the Toronto crash. 20 months later and no findings. Outright refusal of Canada and Delta to release anything.

Why the coverups?
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You call them "coverups" but they are not. Investigations take time. There is no rush, no deadlines. Some investigations actually reopen months or years later as new information is found.

As for the Navy P8, the military does their own thing. Since it is a Boeing off the shelf product, there is some NTSB participation but the Navy is the lead. I would assume within the Navy community much more is known, but they have no responsibility to share outside the service.
 
MauleSkinner said:
According to an NTSB member at the Bombardier Safety Standdown about 10 years ago, about 3% of airliner landings are from unstable approaches.

Small percentage, but the real number per day (which I can’t remember) kind of shocked me.
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It's been a prime focus in the industry for decades. Since there are more than 20,000 flights per day (121 scheduled passenger airlines), that 3% figre (could be 4% depending on which data you use) represents a sobering total of 600-800 flights per day that were flagged for an unstable approach. More alarming, data shows that less than 10% of those unstable approaches resulted in a go-around or missed approach. Therefore, more than 700 flights per day experienced an increased statistical probability of a landing accident.

Despite the somewhat alarming nature of those statistics, actual landing incidents/accidents are extraordinarily rare. Therefore the actual correlation between unstable approaches and accidents is not strong. Among the reasons that the correlation is not particularly strong include the fact that airlines adopt SOPs that will ensure the highest probability of success with every crew, on every flight, every day. Their established stabilized approach criteria are, therefore, very conservative; many approaches that were flagged for exceeding stabilized approach criteria at some point, say, 1000' AGL, may have met all criteria at the point of touchdown resulting in a normal, and safe, landing.

To get a more complete picture it would be necessary to consider just how an unstable approach is defined by each airline and flagged through data acquisition and analysis. But that's an issue for another thread, another day.
 
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Cesarmx said:
So far five lawsuits filed…..and the Prelim has no even been issued yet..only five days after accident…
wsvn.com

5th lawsuit filed in wake of deadly cargo plane crash near MIA as crews dismantle wreckage - WSVN 7News | Miami News, Weather, Sports | Fort Lauderdale

NORTHWEST MIAMI-DADE, FLA. (WSVN) - A fifth lawsuit has been filed in connection to the deadly cargo plane crash near Miami International Airport, as crews<a class="excerpt-read-more"...
wsvn.com wsvn.com
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And yet, here on PoA, where you're guilty until proven guilty, the crew has already been tried and convicted and the sentencing phase is underway in another thread.

[Re-posted after a site crash.]
 
Doc Holliday said:
Let's look at this closer. I take it you've never been associated with the airline industry and have little to zero knowledge of the inner workings. Not a problem.

When an accident happens in the industry other carriers take note, as do the pilots. No one wants to end up in the situation the accident pilots ended up in. Right now everyone is thinking stabilized approach and go around awareness. Initial and recurrent classes are talking about it and during sim training a bit of emphasis is being placed on it.

Once the investigation is over there will be recommendations and it will make it's way into all carriers. Most carriers will be proactive and not wait for the final report and go ahead making changes to training.

The Toronto crash is not really the same as what happened in Miami. Very different dynamics in play here and each accident will change how the industry trains and operates.

The US has had an unprecedented safety record in air carrier aviation When given the shear numbers of operations versus accidents, the percentage is extremely low. This is why your "hundreds of pilots doing stupid stuff" just doesn't make the cut. In airline cockpits the standardization is very high and if someone doesn't follow through, they stick out like a sore thumb. Yes, on occasion someone falls through the cracks and most times they are caught by other crew members, Line Check Airman or training. The Miami accident will focus on how this progressed to a point where several gates failed to catch this problem and the entire industry will learn and adapt from it.

During my career we learned from several accidents, changed our way we trained and operated to achieve the safest airline system in the world. Nothing is perfect but we can strive for perfection.
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Very well stated.
 
FlightmechH3 said:
Why the coverups?
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What cover-up? The military has no legal obligation to publicly release any accident info. And the Canadian TSB tends to follow similar timelines as the US NTSB, which must release a final accident report within 24 months by law. However, there have been exceptions within both agencies like the TWA 800 and SwissAir 111 reports which took 4+ years to be released by the NTSB and TSB respectively. The whole point of these investigations is to determine the specific probable cause and in a number of cases it actually requires starting by determining what did not cause the accident first vs looking only at the "obvious" stuff first as shown in the 800/111 examples above.
 
luvflyin said:
If they’d went ahead with the go around that would probably be a good description. They missed the last wire so to speak
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The Captain in question actually has a history with wires. ;) I’m sure the NTSB won’t go back that far into his records though. That’s even if they still exist.
 
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Seems the strongest case is culture… you know, those phone calls that never actually happen….

If it’s true he was actually observed thinking more about his career than anything else… the answer is sitting right there in plain sight.

More concerned about (at least what he perceived as) career consequences than crashing. I’m also guessing he’s experienced more career consequences than crashing consequences.
 
Tools said:
Seems the strongest case is culture… you know, those phone calls that never actually happen….

If it’s true he was actually observed thinking more about his career than anything else… the answer is sitting right there in plain sight.

More concerned about (at least what he perceived as) career consequences than crashing. I’m also guessing he’s experienced more career consequences than crashing consequences.
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I agree.
 
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