New information from the flight data recorder onboard the crashed Amazon Air Boeing 767-300 paints a detailed picture – and raises questions – about what happened in the cockpit as the plane careened off a runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday.
The 230,000-pound cargo jet, operated for Amazon by contractor 21 Air, hurtled past the end of the runway and slammed into a van full of cleaning workers, an airport fence, concrete vehicle barriers and an SUV before finally stopping and catching fire. Five people in the van were killed.
On Wednesday, investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board will interview the pilots of the crashed plane as well as 21 Air’s assistant chief pilot, NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said Tuesday evening. The NTSB is also expected to share details of what pilots said in the moments leading up to the crash, according to the cockpit voice recorder.
Investigators recovered the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder – often called “the black boxes” – from the tail of the crashed jet and successfully accessed the data at their lab in Washington, Homendy said in a news conference Tuesday.
More than 400 streams of data were captured by the black boxes. The data released Tuesday night by the NTSB illustrates an unusual sequence of events leading up to the plane going off the runway.
