NTSB to Interview Amazon Cargo Plane Pilots After Miami Crash Kills Five

On Sunday afternoon at Miami International Airport, a Boeing 767 cargo plane carrying contact lenses and other freight touched down on the runway traveling faster than it should have. The aircraft did not stop. It ran past the paved surface, crossed roughly 1,300 feet of ground beyond where it should have ended, and plowed into a cluster of parked vehicles. The plane caught fire. Five people on the ground were killed.

By Tuesday night, investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board had recovered both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder from the wreckage. The voice recorder contained more than two hours of clear audio. The flight data recorder held approximately 55 hours of performance information. On Wednesday morning, the two pilots—Captain Joseph Carroll, 55, with 7,145 flight hours logged as of March, and First Officer Jaime Felipe Silva Molina, 37, with 2,655 flight hours as of August—were scheduled to be interviewed. Both had been released from the hospital. NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy announced the plan at a Tuesday evening news conference, making clear that the crew's account would be essential to understanding what happened in the cockpit during those final moments of descent.

The plane weighed approximately 252,000 pounds at the moment of takeoff, including about 32,000 pounds of cargo. Investigators found no hazardous materials aboard. The aircraft was carrying mostly contact lenses. When the NTSB team arrived at the crash site on Tuesday—their first full day on the ground—they focused on collecting perishable evidence: drone footage, video recordings of the aircraft, and tire marks left on the runways. Two of Miami International's four runways remained closed as of Tuesday, though officials were permitted to reopen one partially for departures.

Chihoon Shin, the NTSB's lead investigator, told reporters that the recorded data showed no evidence that speed brakes or thrust reversers had been deployed during the landing. Both systems are designed to help an aircraft slow down or descend more steeply. Shin declined to speculate about why they were not activated. Instead, he outlined the investigative path ahead: a detailed aircraft performance study, a full analysis of the flight data recorder's parameters, and interviews with air traffic controllers, dispatchers, and others present at the scene. The goal was to determine whether the aircraft performed normally during landing, and which systems were functioning as designed.

Pablo Rojas, an aviation attorney at Podhurst Orseck who reviewed video footage of the crash with CBS News Miami, offered preliminary observations. The plane appeared to be moving too fast as it approached and touched down, he said—the horizontal distance it covered during the approach and landing sequence seemed excessive. Rojas also noted something else in the video that caught his attention: the landing gear on the left side appeared to show inconsistent wheel contact with the ground, suggesting a possible mechanical issue. He raised a further question: why had the pilots not executed a go-around, the standard procedure in which a pilot aborts the landing, pulls up, and attempts the approach again. NTSB officials said they could not yet definitively confirm whether a go-around had been attempted.

The investigation will now turn on the crew interviews scheduled for Wednesday morning. Homendy said the NTSB would wait until after speaking with the pilots before releasing the cockpit voice recorder transcript publicly. The agency's focus, as Homendy outlined it, would be on the flight's history, the crew's training and experience, and the sequence of events leading up to impact. The data is in hand. The question now is what the pilots will say about how they were controlling the aircraft, and what that account reveals about the choices made—or not made—in those final seconds before the plane left the runway.