https://www.cbsnews.com/news/miami-plane-crash-21-air-safety...

> The Amazon Prime Air Boeing 767 cargo plane that crashed off a Miami runway on Sunday, killing five people, was operated by a North Carolina company that has been accused by past employees of violating safety regulations, legal documents reveal.

There's a lot in the article, but this allegation is worth highlighting:

> Seuring's attorney, Michael Anello, told the judge that another 21 Air pilot, Johnny Salmonson, "was being pressured to fly in periods of time that were too short to comply with the proper amounts of rest, and that implicated safety. The layovers were too short."

Get-there-itis is absolutely a thing. No big airline would be dumb enough to say it that stuff explicitly but the pressures still exist.

There have been accidents around the world where pilots were trying to save fuel, get off work at a normal time instead of 2 hours extra holding, not wanting to divert and not be home, try to get on the ground so they don’t go over their max hours for the day, etc.

Yes it’s counterproductive. *It happens*. External or internal, it happens.

There have already been crashes where one contributing factor was pressure to land and avoid any kind of delay - even if risky. Remember that pressure doesn’t need to be explicit. It can be the result of all kinds of factors - including physical. Maybe they were already late and pilots with fewer “on time” arrivals are lower in line for promotions. We already have stories from Amazon delivery drivers and it’s not insane to think some of that culture has leaked through to other aspects.

Southwest airlines had a culture of turning around fast at the gate. So maybe no explicit policy but culture can drive unintended consequences and decisions.

>Airlines in the US do not pressure pilots to avoid go arounds. Pilots in the US do not delegate life or death decisions to ops,

Construction companies in the US do not pressure employees to get shit done. Construction workers do not delegate the decisions to work in sketchy circumstances, especially since OSHA holds them accountable for all that.

See how silly that sounds?

They cook up the rules to be all compliant and whatnot and then everyone breaks them a little pretty often and in tasteful ways in order to actually get the job done. If you get caught or screw up, it's on you.

I assume this sort of pressure happens a lot less with pilots because of the cost of screw ups but there's still probably some implied pressure there.

The same FAA that lets Boeing certify its own planes?

You can go around and try again at the same airport long before you have to divert.

How did they ignore the descent rate and speed? They were absolutely diving at the ground. It's just such an elementary mistake.

The branding on the plane is Prime Air, but it's not actually Amazon owned and run. Instead it's a cargo airline (21 Air) that they contract with to operate cargo flights with Prime Air livery on the planes.

It'll be interesting to see the outcome of the NTSB investigation, they're usually quite thorough.

Ah, yes, the Soviets never took risks. It couldn't be that humans are fallible.

I have a strong hunch there a deeper more human/emotional component involved. Like Pilot A was not in the right mental headspace. A bad breakup? Some other kind of personal loss? Or an urgency of a personal kind?

Those are a few situations when a trained individual could make a series of bad decisions. More so if they were forced into the situation (flying) despite raising objections. It has happened to other 21 Air pilots in the past - when they objected to flying but were forced, so who knows?

Absolutely does not absolve this individual of the incident. It’s a burden they’ll have to bear for the rest of their lives. But it could help explain why?

I’m not a manned pilot, but have my part 107 and have spent a few thousand hours flying combat flight sims - ~150kts in a cargo aircraft, four seconds from departing the runway, seems like the worst possible time to abort a touch-and-go. Then consider the numerous automated audio warnings and the copilot suggesting a go-around, and it seems pretty ridiculous to me.

Don’t get me wrong - if I had to land that plane, I’d likely have overrun the runway too. I’m not saying it’s easy, only that it appears to me that they were operating well outside the documented parameters that are the pilot’s responsibility to know.

I just looked it up, and a 767’s Vref is 122-165kts, with Vref at max weight at 144kts. They touched down at 158kts, nose down. The approach was ~35kts over speed, they were above the glide slope, and not bleeding speed fast enough to sink - so they dropped the nose.

From what I can see, they were screwed the moment they touched down - the last moment they had a reasonable opportunity to abort was when they decided to drop the nose and commit instead.

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