The nose and right main landing gear of a Boeing 767 cargo jet touched down on a Miami International Airport runway at 158 knots on September 6, 2026, twenty-four knots faster than the left main gear, which hit the pavement moments later at 134 knots. The National Transportation Safety Board says cockpit recordings show one pilot warned the other that they were coming in far too fast before the jet ran off the far end of the runway, killing five people on the ground.
Flight 7598, a 21 Air-operated Boeing 767-33A flying under contract for Amazon’s Prime Air network, was on a cargo run into Miami when the trouble started. As the crew configured the jet for landing, one pilot called for flaps to be set at 20 degrees while the other pushed back, cautioning that they were too fast. That pilot kept raising the same concern through most of the recording that followed, and investigators found no consistent response from the rest of the flight crew to the repeated warnings.
The cockpit argument over speed
By the time the jet reached the runway, the numbers pulled from its flight data recorder matched the warning nobody resolved. The nose and right main gear touched down at 158 knots groundspeed, and the left main gear came down four seconds later at 134 knots, an uneven arrival the NTSB says investigators are still working through as part of the broader inquiry into the accident.
An automated “too low terrain” alert also sounded four times during the descent, according to the NTSB’s accident docket for the crash, filed under case number DCA26MA352. The crew applied the brakes once the jet was on the ground at 146 knots, released them at 120 knots as the throttles came up in what looked like the start of a go-around, then reapplied the brakes at 117 knots with the throttles pulled back to idle. By then there was not enough runway left to stop; the jet’s final recorded groundspeed was 65 knots, and neither its speed brakes nor its thrust reversers were ever deployed.
A cargo run out of San Juan that ended short of the runway
Flight 7598 had begun that morning on a scheduled domestic cargo run out of Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico, bound for Miami. The jet itself, registered N1997A, was a 32-year-old Boeing 767-33A first delivered in 1994, according to Federal Aviation Administration registry records, which list the aircraft’s owner as Andromeda Leasing II LLC, a leasing company based in Purchase, New York. 21 Air flew the route under its own air carrier certificate, hauling freight on Amazon’s behalf rather than for the retailer directly, using a converted freighter originally built to carry passengers before it was reconfigured for cargo decades into its service life.
The jet went past the end of the runway and struck two vehicles as it came to rest. One of them was a van carrying seven airport cleaning contractors, and the other was a car traveling on a road just outside the airport perimeter. Five people were killed and at least five more were injured, five days before the NTSB’s cockpit-data briefing gave the first detailed account of how fast the jet had actually been going.
Five dead and a chair who called the scene “utter devastation”
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy described the crash site as utter devastation during a briefing on the accident, telling reporters plainly, “The Econoline van is torn apart.” Miami-Dade Commissioner Natalie Milan Orbis, speaking at the same briefing, credited the county’s fire department for reaching the wreckage in a record response time of about 30 seconds, crediting the crews with keeping the toll from climbing further once the jet came to rest among the vehicles it had struck.
No cause has been assigned to the accident, and the NTSB has repeatedly stressed that touchdown speed, the terrain warnings and the brake sequence are individual data points rather than a finished explanation. Investigators have recovered and downloaded both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, and the agency says a specialist group will convene at its Washington headquarters to produce a written transcript of the final minutes in the cockpit. A full transcript, and the analysis that follows it, typically take investigators months to complete on an accident of this scale, and the board has given no target date for either the transcript or a final report.
Until that work is finished, the docket opened for the crash carries only the numbers the agency has released so far: 158 knots on touchdown, a four-second gap before the left gear settled at 134 knots, and four separate terrain warnings that nobody aboard the 32-year-old freighter managed to head off before it ran out of runway.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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