Pilot on Doomed Amazon Plane Issued Warnings About Speed

For nearly two minutes, one of the pilots of the Amazon cargo plane that careened off a Miami runway and killed five people repeatedly warned his counterpart they were going too fast as they approached for landing and after touchdown, 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 AP reports. The plane touched down awkwardly, briefly attempted to take off, and then smashed into a van carrying the five victims. More details and analysis:

• At the point when the pilot first called out the plane was speeding, former FAA official Mike O'Donnell said the crew could have done a number of things to slow it down, including extending the spoilers, cutting the throttles, and lowering the landing gear. Or the pilots could have just aborted the landing at that point and circled to try again. "You have plenty of time to slow down, plenty of time to say, let's just do a go-around at two minutes out," said O'Donnell, who used to oversee airport safety and crash investigations.

• Information from the flight data recorder that was released late Tuesday shows how unsteady the plane was as it came in to land amid strong winds, and then the pilots briefly disengaged the brakes and shoved the throttles up as if they were trying to take off again and retry the landing. But they abandoned that just four seconds later.
• The cockpit audio recordings also captured a series of automated warnings from the plane about the speed of descent and the approaching terrain. O'Donnell said those terrain warnings reinforce that the plane was unsteady and suggest it may not have been configured correctly for landing.

• The Amazon plane was well down the runway when its right and nose landing gear first touched down, reducing how much distance the plane had on the runway ahead of it to stop. Strong winds at the airport as storms moved in may have created a tail wind that helped propel the plane forward. Tracking site Flightradar24 estimated based on the NTSB data that the plane was nearly halfway down the 9,360-foot runway when it first touched down. Several experts have said the pilots should have aborted that landing while the plane was still in the air and circled around to retry it.
• Former airline pilot and safety expert Steve Arroyo said the details released Wednesday show a lack of teamwork in the cockpit and suggest the pilot at the controls may have been too focused on the landing to acknowledge the speed warnings. Mary Schiavo, who is a former Inspector General of the Transportation Department, said she wonders if the pilot at the controls was the more senior captain while the less experienced first officer called out the warnings "and the junior pilot was not aggressive in challenging."