An air traffic controller failed to warn the pilots of an Amazon cargo plane about potentially strong tailwinds as they prepared to land in Miami, despite federal rules requiring the information, according to a preliminary report released Thursday by the National Transportation Safety Board. The plane later ran off the runway, killing five people last month.
Only four minutes before authorizing the Amazon flight to land, the controller had given another pilot a wind advisory, reporting southerly gusts of up to 25 mph.
However, the controller “did not issue information about the wind” to the Amazon crew, the report said.
Federal regulations require controllers to provide “both wind direction and velocity” when clearing an aircraft to use a runway with a tailwind component, according to the NTSB.
The preliminary report did not identify the cause of the crash. The investigation remains ongoing and could take more than a year to finish.
The plane, which was carrying packages of contact lenses for Amazon, arrived from Puerto Rico and landed at high speed at Miami International Airport on Sept. 6. It traveled about 1,200 feet beyond the runway before crashing.
The aircraft struck a van carrying employees of a company that cleans airplanes.
Five people inside the van were killed. Two others in the van suffered serious injuries, as did the driver of a car struck by the plane.
Both pilots sustained minor injuries.
Tailwinds can make landing a plane harder
Aviation experts have said weather appears to have played at least some role in the accident.
Tailwinds can reduce an aircraft’s ability to slow down and carry it beyond the optimal landing area 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 US.
A landing with a gusting tailwind demands “more concentration on the part of the pilot,” but it is not impossible, said former NTSB member John Goglia.
Goglia called the failure to communicate the wind conditions “a significant omission,” while cautioning that it alone would not have caused the crash. “Every crash is a chain of events. That’s just one event,” he said.
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The plane had little runway left when it touched down
A summary of cockpit voice recordings previously released by the NTSB showed that one pilot repeatedly warned the other that the plane was approaching and completing its landing too quickly.
The other pilot, however, never gave “a consistent verbal response” to those warnings, the NTSB said.
The pilots had flown together for the first time earlier that same day, according to the preliminary report.
Cockpit audio also recorded several automated alerts warning about the aircraft’s descent rate and nearby terrain.
The plane touched down at 184 mph, already roughly three-quarters of a mile beyond the beginning of the runway, the NTSB reported.
The pilots may have attempted to abort the landing, but investigators said the effort could have come too late.
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 is 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.
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.