Comment by wanderingmoose
16 hours ago
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.
16 hours ago
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.
I've never heard of anything even close to this.
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.
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."
Notably, none of those allegations from the fired former chief(!) pilot actively suing the company while appealing his rejected OSHA case touch on in-flight procedures.
If any of those are true, it will be very bad for the carrier, but they are not related to any of the failures being reported on.
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Ahh, so the Amazon delivery contractor squeeze but the air cargo version, with the air cargo corporate entity shielding Amazon from liability.
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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.
Get-there-itis is - quite famously - a pilot's internal desire (note: written before your ninja edit).
Sure there have been plenty of incidents. Can you point to one in the US, with pilots flying big planes, that hasn't led to regulatory change?
Its worth pointing out that pilots are almost always paid by flight hour. In other words, they get paid more to go around.
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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.
And high levels of stress can lead people to break rules. People lose the cognitive faculties needed for compliance. Even things that person personally believes and agrees with.
Is there any evidence of your theory?
Has timeliness based performance reviews ever been reported at any US carrier in the past half century?
We are talking about the same company that forces its employees to piss in bottles while driving to save time.
I'm no Amazon fan, but that was routine in trucking before Bezos was even born.
Similar to farmers working in the fields - they didn't walk all the way back to the farmhouse if they had to pee.
Go arounds are not even very common (like 0.3% of landings).
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.
Fast gate turnarounds have nothing to do with what happens in the cockpit. That affects the cleaning crews.
Take a look at Southwest's safety record. I believe they have 1 fatality due to an air incident in their history due to an uncontained engine failure that was not related to maintenance.
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Turnaround at a gate and a life-or-death go-around judgement are two entirely different operations governed by entirely different sections of the FAA.
Also this was Amazon, not Southwest.
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>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 only thing silly is comparing the construction industry to the airline industry. Construction is pretty notorious for openly encouraging unsafe work environments, airlines are not.
Airlines are much more tightly bound by the FAA than any construction company is to any regulatory agency. Airlines have to get permission to let their pilots read documents off an iPad instead of paper, for example. It just isn't a good comparison to compare the most safety aware industry on earth to one famous for ignoring safety rules.
I've worked construction. I have a pilots license in multiple countries (including the US). They aren't the same.
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The same FAA that lets Boeing certify its own planes?
This is based on my understanding from several pilots who have weighted in.
The cockpit voice recorder transcript has the copilot repeatedly saying "we're coming in too fast" but the pilot never clearly acknolwedges.
The copilot ought to have been more assertive and said "We need to go around. NOW."
The pilot shouldn't have needed that. He should have made the call himself, but even if he was unsure, once his copilot called that he should have done the right thing.
Neither of them will ever fly again. The only question now is if either of them will go to prison. There's already a civil wrongful death lawsuit against them.
> Neither of them will ever fly again
Why do you say this so confidently? Aviation generally does not have a culture of taking future employment away from people proximate to accidents.
Seems likely the FO will be fine. The CA will have some hard questions to answer.
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.
You can go around and try again at the same airport long before you have to divert.
Normalization of deviance. While there may have been some pressure from corporate or whatever, my guess is that the pilot flying was the one who only got his type rating a few months ago and that he'd done this at least a few times before in another type and gotten away with it. Now in a bigger, less nimble craft, he didn't.
I suspect the pilots knew it wasn't a great approach but it just didn't click how bad it was. They just felt committed to the approach and thought they could 'fix it' without realizing how bad things really were. Having good enough situational awareness that you wave off when you are supposed to generally means that you also aren't wildly off speed/other parameters. They clearly had lost situational awareness.
The thing that amazes me about this is the timeline here:
00:30 The nose and right main gear touched down at a groundspeed of 158 knots.
...
00:19 The left main gear touched down at a groundspeed of 134 knots.
00:15 A pilot called for a go-around.
11 seconds and 24 knots after the nose touched down and then the left main finally also touched down? Wow. Then 4 seconds after all that the go-around. It is one thing to hold the nose off for that long, but a main mount?!
How did they ignore the descent rate and speed? They were absolutely diving at the ground. It's just such an elementary mistake.
Bingo.
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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.
CH Robinson, though, just lost a lawsuit at the Supreme Court with similar premises. They are a freight forwarder and third-party logistics outfit that contracts large amounts of capacity with subcontractors (airlines, trucking companies, shipping lines, etc.) and sells a complete package to their clients.
One of CHR's service providers was conducting hiring shenanigans and not fully, legally screening their drivers. One of the service provider's drivers hit another vehicle and crippled that vehicle's driver, who sued. CHR argued all liability should fall on the trucking company who hired the driver. The Supreme Court said no, CHR could be held liable for negligence in vetting their service provider as well, because it was ultimately CHR's load being carried.
I'm not a lawyer, but under that legal precedent, it seems Amazon might not be off the hook for damages in this case, given it was their subcontractor who was carrying Amazon cargo in a jet with "Prime Air" on the side.
Could a company that won't let delivery drivers stop to pee possibly be pushing their pilots that hard? Yes. Yes, they could.