tldw, per Blancolirio: unstable approach, crew should have done a go around at 1000 agl but did not attempt one until it was too late, then aborted the go around.
I think the real question is why didn't the pilots do a go around. I bet there are underlying pressures from the airlines and/or amazon to not do a go around to avoid schedule delays or fuel costs.
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, especially since the FAA legally holds them accountable for that. All pilots are aware that they are responsible for the decision to go around or not.
Any airline found to be pressuring pilots to avoid go arounds would be in a world of pain with the FAA.
On cargo flights in particular timing and fuel usage are less critical than passenger flights, and a go around doesn't affect either much.
Pressure to avoid go arounds would also be incredibly counter productive since go arounds exist to preserve life and property. Pilots do go arounds to avoid costly incidents.
You are correct that the question is why they didn't do a go around, but I would bet a large sum of money that airline pressure to avoid go arounds was not a factor.
In one of the videos you can see dark clouds behind the plane. I suspect the pilots knew they'd have to divert to a different airport if they couldn't land and put pressure on themselves to not have to do that.
if the many little video documentaries I've been watching (shoutout Dark Records on YT) are righy, profit motive at the cost of safety is a fairly regular occurence
human lives and suffering are externalities, after all
Yep, its also the most intuitive way to reason about it when you look at the data. Unfortunately, a bad call. I'm sure many of us would have made the same mistake.
> I'm sure many of us would have made the same mistake.
From the reporting and commenting on this incident, that is not the impression I'm getting. This wasn't one bad call after getting half way down the runway, this was a continuous stream of bad decision making for the entire approach, with the copilot suggesting the pilot go around too.
Also: this kind of incident is very rare, so obviously, the vast majority of pilots don't make this mistake.
Private pilot here. No, I'm quite sure very few of you here would have made the same mistake as evidenced by the fact that literally hundreds of thousands of aircraft land successfully every day, many of them under much more adverse conditions. This is not a oh-it-could-have-happened-to-anyone kind of screwup, this is a did-this-guy-really-go-through-basic-pilot-training kind of screwup.
They made a series of at least ten (and that's kind of charitable) this-must-never-happen mistakes that likely rise to the level of extraordinary criminal negligence, including ignoring checklists, alarms, configuring the plane for landing in general, and basically everything related to safety.
You don't have to extend sympathy, just as you don't have to extend sympathy to drunk drivers who kill people.
I am not a pilot and I don't know anything about flying. I can go along with the idea that the pilot / crew made mistakes. So the next obvious question is how do we make sure this does not happen again?
You're being downvoted because actual qualified aviators are telling you how egregious of a mistake this looks to be, and you're quibbling with them without any professional credibility on the subject.
In any accident like this, it’s generally a good idea to wait for the full NTSB report before drawing any firm conclusions.
That said, it is exceedingly difficult to find any explanation for what happened in this case that doesn’t boil down to incompetence or gross negligence.
There were so many opportunities to avoid this accident. The crew seemingly more or less single-handedly punched a hole straight through the entire Swiss cheese model. It’s so bad it’s hard to imagine they weren’t drunk at the controls.
> There was no indication in the recorded data that speed brakes or thrust reversers were deployed.
I don't know anything about flying. Is this normal? Doesn't sound like it, but I don't know why the pilots would not have used these things that sound useful.
The lack of contact of the left wheels on the ground, which the Weight of Wheel sensor deployment depends on, as in both wheels being grounded, which the auto-speed brakes/thrust reversers depend on, worsened the whole situation as the crew seems to be unaware why they weren't losing speed after they'd 'landed'.
Every single thing they could do wrong at, they did.
> Every single thing they could do wrong at, they did.
There are just too many ways to screw up for that ever to be the case.
For instance, they could also have been lined up to land on something other than the runway they were cleared to land on -- see Air Canada Flight 759, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759, which came within 14 feet of colliding with an aircraft on the taxiway they mistook for the runway..
Take this with all the salt that random third-party guesses about a still-in-investigation event should be taken with -- think fully salt-cured ham -- but it looks like the landing was with a quartering tail wind, and the upwind (left) gear never really got weight on it; the wheel bogie needs to be straightened by weight against both the front and back wheels to register weight-on-wheel, and the auto-brake systems need positive weight-on-wheels from at least one redundant sensor on each of the three gear to engage. Came down hot, and basically skimmed with one wheel partially off the ground for some, most, or all of the way down the runway, preventing the braking systems from kicking in.
Really that's all that needs to be said at the moment. They had way too much energy[1], which anyone with flight sim or RC experience will recognize as a routine mistake when hand-flying.
The question is why all (all!) the layers of checklists and warnings and process and ATC direction somehow failed in combination to prevent. Yeah, they should have aborted for sure, but they didn't, and we won't know why for a good while yet.
[1] Which can just as easily mean "too high" as "too fast", c.f. the sink rate warnings in the logs which would be consistent with trying to squeeze the airplane down onto the runway. But again we won't know without more data.
The plane has sensors to determine if those devices can safely deploy and their activation is blocked otherwise. If it’s still partially flying they would make the situation worse. It appears this plane didn’t make full contact with the runway until it was too late to stop safely.
Watch the Blancolirio channel videos for a better explanation.
The Boeing 767 does not have a Flaps 40 setting. The "Forty" callout was an automated annunciation of the radar-altimeter measured altitude above the runway.
I've been watching the Flying for Money videos on this. He has interesting insight. It's a bit disappointing he just threw the data into an LLM for processing since it doesn't seem that hard to process, but otherwise he's been pretty good at bringing up likely possibilities based on Occam's razor. Mostly around negligence and most recently about junior vs senior pilot shyness vs ego.
What I don't understand from his analysis though was early on he said the tail wind increased a minute before landing which is too quick to have communicated. If that's true, we need to get better about this. A minute to send a message is ages. It should be automatic between the airport and the aircraft.
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, especially since the FAA legally holds them accountable for that. All pilots are aware that they are responsible for the decision to go around or not.
Any airline found to be pressuring pilots to avoid go arounds would be in a world of pain with the FAA.
On cargo flights in particular timing and fuel usage are less critical than passenger flights, and a go around doesn't affect either much.
Pressure to avoid go arounds would also be incredibly counter productive since go arounds exist to preserve life and property. Pilots do go arounds to avoid costly incidents.
You are correct that the question is why they didn't do a go around, but I would bet a large sum of money that airline pressure to avoid go arounds was not a factor.
human lives and suffering are externalities, after all
If people die in the process, that's regrettable but its a sacrifice he is willing to make.
From the reporting and commenting on this incident, that is not the impression I'm getting. This wasn't one bad call after getting half way down the runway, this was a continuous stream of bad decision making for the entire approach, with the copilot suggesting the pilot go around too.
Also: this kind of incident is very rare, so obviously, the vast majority of pilots don't make this mistake.
You don't have to extend sympathy, just as you don't have to extend sympathy to drunk drivers who kill people.
I don't have sympathy. I also do know of drunk drivers that have been arrested, who are, good people. Shit happens. I'm not going to judge.
Is there anything that can be done at all here?
Sincerely, A former military aviator
That said, it is exceedingly difficult to find any explanation for what happened in this case that doesn’t boil down to incompetence or gross negligence.
There were so many opportunities to avoid this accident. The crew seemingly more or less single-handedly punched a hole straight through the entire Swiss cheese model. It’s so bad it’s hard to imagine they weren’t drunk at the controls.
I don't know anything about flying. Is this normal? Doesn't sound like it, but I don't know why the pilots would not have used these things that sound useful.
Every single thing they could do wrong at, they did.
There are just too many ways to screw up for that ever to be the case.
For instance, they could also have been lined up to land on something other than the runway they were cleared to land on -- see Air Canada Flight 759, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759, which came within 14 feet of colliding with an aircraft on the taxiway they mistook for the runway..
Really that's all that needs to be said at the moment. They had way too much energy[1], which anyone with flight sim or RC experience will recognize as a routine mistake when hand-flying.
The question is why all (all!) the layers of checklists and warnings and process and ATC direction somehow failed in combination to prevent. Yeah, they should have aborted for sure, but they didn't, and we won't know why for a good while yet.
[1] Which can just as easily mean "too high" as "too fast", c.f. the sink rate warnings in the logs which would be consistent with trying to squeeze the airplane down onto the runway. But again we won't know without more data.
Watch the Blancolirio channel videos for a better explanation.
https://youtu.be/Mu9fPuew9zg
What I don't understand from his analysis though was early on he said the tail wind increased a minute before landing which is too quick to have communicated. If that's true, we need to get better about this. A minute to send a message is ages. It should be automatic between the airport and the aircraft.
Prime Air crash: 10+ mandatory go-around triggers were ignored [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650689 - September 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm6G7EOP5Qc