Amazon pauses 21 Air after the Miami 767 that killed five cleaners

Amazon said on Sunday it would stop flying packages on 21 Air, the North Carolina cargo airline whose Boeing 767 overran Miami International Airport on 6 September and killed five people on the ground. Spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said the company had spent the week supporting the investigation and reviewing the surrounding circumstances. Other contractors will take the routes. Amazon said customers should not see a delay.

Flight 7598 was a 21 Air service operated for Amazon Air from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Miami. The aircraft, N1997A, a 32-year-old Boeing 767-33AER converted to freighter standard and painted as Amazon One, landed on runway 30 at about 1.53 p.m. It left the paved surface, struck a Ford Econoline van used by an airline cleaning contractor, went through a fence, crossed Northwest 67th Avenue and hit a Toyota Corolla Cross. All five dead were in the van. Five other people, including both pilots, were hurt.

Miami-Dade officials named the dead as Yoel Rodriguez Naranjo, 53; Rolando Aleman Leon, 55; Julio C. Pineda, 75; Carlos Acosta Fajardo, 53; and Javierkys Reyes Quevedo, 47. They were cleaners, not flight crew. That fact is the one that turns a runway excursion into a workplace killing on a public road beside an airport.

The National Transportation Safety Board released cockpit details on 9 September. One pilot warned that the jet was too fast on final and again after the wheels touched. About 16 seconds after the apparent touchdown a crew member called for a go-around. The aircraft was already well beyond the aiming point. Investigators said it was moving at 138 miles an hour when the brakes released. It then ran about 1,300 feet, or 396 metres, past the end of the runway.

21 Air said it was confident in its procedures and training and that it would keep working with the NTSB and with partners. The airline has flown Amazon cargo since 2024 and specialises in routes to and from Mexico. Amazon listed the carriers that can absorb the flying: Sun Country, Hawaiian, Air Transport International, ABX Air, ASL Airlines and Cargojet. The Prime Air network is a contractor web, not a single private fleet. This crash is the third serious accident involving a 767 flying Amazon cargo.

That contractor model is now the policy question. Amazon does not hold the air operator certificate on these flights. It buys lift. When a landing goes wrong, the retailer can pause a vendor in a weekend statement and move volume by Monday. The families of the cleaners cannot. Regulators will spend months on speed, touchdown point, brake use, weather and the 32-year history of the airframe, which began life with Belgian charter carrier Sobelair in 1994.

Nantel said safety is the priority in Amazon's own work and in work done by partners. The pause is the first concrete step that followed that sentence. It is also a limited step. The other Amazon contractors keep flying. The NTSB keeps the wreck. 21 Air keeps its certificate unless the Federal Aviation Administration says otherwise.

What the pause does immediately is remove Amazon's paint from 21 Air's remaining rotations. What it does not do is answer why a heavy freighter arrived fast, touched long, and still had enough energy to leave airport land and hit a van of contract cleaners on an avenue. That answer will come, if it comes, in the NTSB docket, not in a retailer's vendor note.