Flight recorders recovered from ‘devastating’ Amazon cargo plane crash

Full account

Investigators have retrieved the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder from an Amazon-branded cargo aircraft that crashed after overshooting a runway at Miami International Airport, though officials say locating and recovering victims remains the immediate priority. The Boeing 767-300, operated on Amazon's behalf by the carrier 21 Air, came down shortly before 2pm local time on Sunday (around 7pm in the UK) as it arrived on its third flight of the day, having flown in from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Five people are confirmed to have died and a further five were seriously hurt, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB); the two pilots aboard the aircraft were also injured, and none of those who died had been formally identified as of Monday.

After running off the end of the runway, the jet struck navigational equipment before colliding with a white Ford van used by a contract cleaning firm, in which seven people were travelling. It then broke through the airport's perimeter fence and hit a Toyota car before finally stopping roughly 1,300ft beyond the runway. NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy, briefing reporters at the airport on Monday, described the wreckage as 'devastating', with wreckage from the plane, the vehicles and the fencing strewn across the site, and acknowledged the grim task facing emergency crews. Footage circulated afterwards showed a police officer discovering a survivor trapped in an overturned vehicle and calling for rescue teams to free them, a rare moment of relief amid the wider toll.

Homendy stressed that investigators were still at an early, 'fact-finding' stage and could not yet point to a cause. Alongside examining the aircraft's flight history, the pilots' training and experience, radar data and the plane's performance, separate teams will assess its systems and engines, while a meteorologist studies conditions at the time of landing; earlier reporting had noted a thunderstorm near the airport with gusts of up to 26 knots around the time of the landing. A significant strand of the inquiry will consider whether the runway ought to have been fitted with an engineered materials arresting system (EMAS) – a bed of crushable material designed to bring an overrunning aircraft to a safe stop, and already in use at more than 120 airports across the United States – which Homendy called a 'key' element of the investigation. Fuel leaking from the aircraft was also being cleared from the site.

With recovery work still under way, officials appealed to members of the public who may have captured photographs or video of the crash to come forward, saying such material could assist the inquiry. Two of Miami International Airport's four runways remained shut in the aftermath, and travellers were told to expect continuing delays. Homendy said any safety recommendations arising from the investigation would only be issued once it concluded, framing the NTSB's purpose in stark terms: to stop a similar disaster happening again, warning that recommendations were of little use unless they were actually acted upon.

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