The NTSB has now put numbers on the last half-minute of the Amazon-branded Boeing 767 that left Runway 30 at Miami on the afternoon of 6 September. The aircraft was a 21 Air 767-300 freighter, Flight 7598 from San Juan, flying for Amazon Air. Nose gear and right main gear touched the pavement at 158 knots. Seven seconds later the brakes came on. The left main gear was still in the air. It came down eleven seconds after the first contact, at 134 knots. Four seconds after that the brakes came off and the throttles moved to settings the investigator in charge, Chihoon Shin, described as consistent with go-around thrust. Four seconds later the throttles went back to idle and the brakes went on again. Ground speed was then 117 knots. The recording ended with the aeroplane still moving. There was no indication in the flight-data that speed brakes or thrust reversers deployed. The jet left the paved surface, struck a van and an SUV, and caught fire. Five people in the vehicles died. Five others were hurt. Neither pilot was seriously injured. The investigation is open. Those facts are not a cause. They are the sequence the board is now asking the crew to explain.
A go-around after the wheels are on the ground is a rejected landing. Training treats it as a decision, not a conversation. Either the aeroplane is committed to stop or it is committed to fly. Landing, adding thrust, then idling again spends runway that will not come back. Shin’s timeline suggests that interval cost the crew both distance and configuration. Spoilers and reversers are the devices that dump lift and put engine energy into stopping. If they never came out, the 767 was asking wheel brakes alone to kill more than 150 knots on a runway that was already being used from a late, asymmetric touchdown. Whether that was a cockpit choice, a system that did not arm because the landing was not recognised as a landing, or a mechanical failure is exactly what the NTSB has not decided. Chair Jennifer Homendy said the pilots would be interviewed before cockpit-voice details were released. That is the correct order. Data describes what the levers did. It does not yet describe what the people thought.
The landing itself was not textbook. A 767 is meant to meet the runway on the main trucks, not the nose. Touching nose and right gear first, with the left truck still flying, is an unstable arrival. Planned landing weight was about 231,000 pounds, including 32,000 pounds of cargo, well below the type’s maximum. Weight does not explain a 158-knot first contact or an eleven-second wait for the third truck. Weather around Miami that afternoon included storms. Runway state, wind and the precise touchdown point relative to the threshold have not been published as conclusions. What is published is that the aeroplane went about 1,300 feet past the end of the pavement, through airport ground and onto a public road where a cleaning contractor’s van was moving. The dead were named by the sheriff as workers in that van. The pilots, identified as captain Joseph Carol and first officer Jaime Felipe Silva Molina, walked away. That split is why this accident is already a ground-safety story as well as a flight-path story. A runway overrun that stays on airport property is a hull and a closed strip. One that crosses the fence is a public road.
21 Air is a contractor. Amazon puts its colours on the aeroplane. The safety file still belongs to the operator, the manufacturer, the airport and the regulator. Former employees have previously alleged reporting and maintenance pressure at the carrier. Those claims are not findings in this investigation. They are context the board will have to treat with evidence, not rumour. Converted passenger 767s remain the backbone of a large share of U.S. domestic freighter lift. Their stopping performance, reverser logic and spoiler arming after an unusual touchdown are now in the same public light as the last thirty seconds of Flight 7598.
Until the NTSB writes a probable cause, the useful question is operational. How late can a crew still choose the missed approach after an uneven landing. What does the 767 think a landing is if only two of three trucks are on the ground. Why reversers and speed brakes stay silent in the recorder. How an airport designs the land beyond the threshold when cargo jets and contractor vans share the same edge of the map. The crew tried to go around. The aeroplane still ran off the world. The gap between those two sentences is the investigation.