This photo provided by the NTSB on Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2026, shows the flight data recorder of the Amazon cargo plane that ejected from the runway at Miami International Airport. NTSB/via AP hide caption toggle caption NTSB/via AP For nearly two minutes, one of the pilots of the Amazon cargo plane that skidded off a Miami runway and killed five people repeatedly warned his counterpart that they were going too fast while approaching and after landing, according to flight information released Wednesday. A summary of cockpit voice recordings compiled by the National Transportation Safety Board said the fellow pilot never gave “a consistent verbal response” to the warnings. The plane landed awkwardly, attempted to take off briefly, and then crashed into a van carrying the five victims. The Amazon plane arrived quickly Sunday afternoon and then passed about 1,300 feet (396 meters) past the end of the runway and crashed into a van carrying workers from an airplane cleaning company before crashing into a compact van that was sliding down a public road before catching fire. The five people who died were in the van. Five other people were injured, including two who remained in critical condition Tuesday. The two pilots survived and were interviewed Wednesday by investigators. The pilots had time to correct or abandon their landing. At the time the pilot first noticed the plane was accelerating, former FAA official Mike O’Donnell said the crew could have done several things to slow it down, including extending the spoilers, cutting the throttles and lowering the landing gear. Or the pilots could have aborted the landing at that point and circled around to try again. “You have a lot of time to slow down, a lot of time to say, let’s just do a two-minute lap,” said O’Donnell, who used to oversee airport security and accident investigations. The plane was unstable as it approached the ground Flight data recorder information released Tuesday night shows how unstable the plane was as it landed in high winds, and then the pilots briefly released the brakes and accelerated as if they were trying to take off again and retry the landing. But they abandoned him just four seconds later. Cockpit audio recordings also captured a series of automatic warnings from the plane about descent speed and approaching terrain. O’Donnell said those terrain warnings reinforce that the plane was unstable and suggest it may not have been properly configured for landing. The Amazon plane was well along the runway when its front and right landing gear first touched down, reducing the distance the plane had on the runway in front of it to stop. Strong winds at the airport as the storms moved may have created a tailwind that helped propel the plane forward. The tracking site Flightradar24 estimated, based on NTSB data, that the plane was nearly halfway down the 9,360-foot runway when it first landed. The full transcript of the cockpit conversation will not be released until later in the investigation. Experts question how well the pilots worked together. Several experts have said the pilots should have aborted the landing while the plane was still in the air and circled around to try again. Workers inspect an Amazon cargo plane two days after it overshot a runway at Miami International Airport, Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2026, in Miami. Rebecca Blackwell/AP hide caption toggle caption Rebecca Blackwell/AP Former airline pilot and safety expert Steve Arroyo said details released Wednesday show a lack of teamwork in the cockpit and suggest the pilot at the controls may have been too focused on landing to recognize speed warnings. “Where is the coordination? Where is the leadership here in terms of managing the flight deck? And following the trained guidelines set forth in the company flight manual?” -Arroyo questioned-. Mary Schiavo, a former Department of Transportation inspector general, said she wonders if the pilot at the controls was the senior captain, while the less experienced first officer shouted warnings “and the junior pilot was not aggressive in challenging.” Investigators will consider anything that could have been a factor. The 32-year-old Boeing 767 was originally built to carry passengers and flew for various airlines in foreign countries for more than two decades before being converted to a cargo plane in 2015, according to flight tracking site Flightradar24. The final flight was operated by 21 Air, a North Carolina-based cargo airline that has been flying packages for Amazon since 2024. NTSB investigators were expected to review the plane’s ownership history, weather conditions at the airport, maintenance records and 21 Air operations. It is the second cargo plane accident in the United States in less than a year. A UPS plane crashed after losing its engine while accelerating on the runway at Louisville’s Muhammad Ali International Airport in October. The accident killed the three pilots and 12 people on the ground. Twenty-three more were injured.
